Energy Act 2023 decommissioning fees start 30 September
If you have never read a commencement regulation before, you are in good company. The statutory instrument published on legislation.gov.uk on 16 July 2026 looks dense, but its job is fairly narrow: it switches on part of the Energy Act 2023 from 30 September 2026 and makes sure cases already moving through the system are not pushed into a new fee rule halfway through. Signed by Energy Minister Michael Shanks for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, this is the fifth set of commencement regulations under the 2023 Act. That sounds technical because it is, but the plain-English point is simple. Government is changing how certain offshore decommissioning fees are charged, and it needs a clean handover date.
To see why this matters, it helps to translate the legal wording. When an offshore oil or gas installation, or a submarine pipeline, reaches the end of its working life, companies must deal with decommissioning. In the Petroleum Act 1998, the formal term is an abandonment programme. That is the plan sent to the Secretary of State setting out how the infrastructure will be taken out of use. Under the Offshore (Oil and Gas) Installation and Pipeline Abandonment Fees Regulations 2012, companies pay fees when they submit one of these programmes or when they ask to revise one. Those 2012 rules are the old charging system that this 2026 instrument is beginning to move away from.
The legal switch happens on 30 September 2026, which the regulation calls the appointed day. On that date, section 299(3) to (7) of the Energy Act 2023 comes into force. The explanatory note says those provisions remove the Secretary of State’s old powers under sections 29 and 34 of the Petroleum Act 1998 to charge these fees and to make related regulations. They also change how the Secretary of State can recover expenditure under section 33 of the 1998 Act, because Parliament has already created a new charging route in section 38C. You can think of this as changing the legal route the invoice travels through, rather than changing the fact that decommissioning work still has to be regulated.
Where people often get lost is regulation 3, the saving provision. A saving provision keeps old law alive for a limited set of cases so the handover does not create confusion or unfairness. In this instrument, the old 2012 fee rules and the linked Petroleum Act payment provisions still apply in some situations after 30 September 2026. **What this means:** if a request to determine the fee for submitting a relevant abandonment programme reached the Secretary of State before 30 September 2026, that case stays under the old 2012 rules. The same is true if, before that date, the Secretary of State had already published a draft of the programme on GOV.UK.
The same protection applies to revisions. If a company asked for a fee to be determined for a proposal to revise a relevant abandonment programme before 30 September 2026, that revision also stays on the old rules, including the payment route in section 34(4) of the Petroleum Act 1998. That may sound like dry administration, but it does an important job. It stops companies, officials and the public from having to guess whether a case that was already under way should suddenly be billed under a different legal basis. In other words, the regulation is there to stop a bureaucratic cliff-edge.
There is also a boundary line in the definitions. These saving rules are about offshore installations and submarine pipelines that are not carbon capture and storage pipelines. The explanatory material makes the position clearer: the 2012 Regulations did not apply to carbon storage installations or carbon capture and storage pipelines in the first place. So if you are reading this in the bigger picture of energy transition policy, this instrument is still mainly about the legacy oil and gas decommissioning system. It is not a broad rewrite of the rules for carbon storage infrastructure.
This is also a useful lesson in how Acts of Parliament actually start working. Not every part of an Act begins on the day it is passed. Ministers often bring sections into force later, piece by piece, using commencement regulations like this one. That gives departments time to line up guidance, fees, staff processes and transitional rules before the law fully takes effect. Seen that way, this instrument is less dramatic than a brand-new policy announcement, but no less important. It is the kind of legal housekeeping that decides which rules businesses follow on a real date, with real invoices and real compliance duties attached.
By the time 30 September 2026 arrives, the new position is fairly clear. Fresh cases will move into the newer charging system linked to section 38C, while older cases that have already crossed the specified steps remain with the 2012 fee regime. The whole point is continuity: change the system, but do not scramble cases already in progress. For readers trying to make sense of statutory instruments, that is the clearest takeaway. This regulation does not ask whether decommissioning should happen. It tells you when the fee law changes, who is protected by the old rules, and why commencement regulations matter more than their dry title suggests.