It comes as a bit of a surprise then to find that the onshore epicentre of the industry - Scotland’s North-east - is not in pole position to meet this new opportunity now that it might actually be on the point of happening on a substantial scale.
The decision by Shell to decommission the Brent Delta topside on Teeside, by-passing Scottish ports, has acted as a bit of a wake-up call.
If Scotland does not have a strategy for maximising the economic benefits of decommissioning, then it is long past time to get one.
It was fine to talk up life extension of North Sea fields but it was also prudent to recognise that a downturn would mean that decommissioning would be back on the agenda.
Oil companies cannot just close down fields and walk away.
There has been a steady stream of decommissioning work over the past few years.
But it has tended to go to Norway, Holland and the east of England.
Some of this is dictated by geography but there is still a feeling that our own ports – with the exception of Lerwick – are under-prepared.
It is not as if there hasn’t been plenty time to think about it.
Shell got itself, quite literally, into deep water in 1995 when with Government approval, they settled for sinking the Brent Spar platform in the Atlantic depths.
It was probably sensible but it created a terrible fuss.
Greenpeace turned it into an international cause célèbre and the environmental risks of deep-sea disposal were hugely overstated.
Eventually, Shell bowed to public opinion and the structure festered for a few years in a Norwegian fjord before being used in the reconstruction of Stavanger harbour.
More fundamentally, the episode spelt the end of deep water disposal and its replacement with onshore solutions.
The environmental benefits of that approach are dubious, to say the least, and this not going to be a clean and tidy industry.
But once that decision was taken, it was inevitably an industry to prepare for.
As the oil price rose from the late 1990s, it made sense for the companies to keep the fields active and postpone decommissioning for as long as possible.
This also fitted with the political orthodoxy that the future was all about life extension of the North Sea, rather than orderly decline.
We are now past the time for such kidology.
If Scotland, and North-east ports in particular, want to benefit from decommissioning, they will have to invest accordingly and then go out and sell themselves.
It is not too late but the warning signs are there.
FOR at least the past 20 years, there has been talk of decommissioning as the next natural stage of the North Sea oil and gas industry with billions of pounds and thousands of jobs at stake.