Oil Spill Facts And Statistics
On this page, you can find all our data, visualizations, and writing relating to oil spills. Specifically, this refers to oil spills from tankers container ships transporting oil where consistent, high-quality global data is available. Oil spills are more common than you might think, and they happen in many different ways.
Thousands of oil spills occur in U.S. waters each year. Most of these spills are small, for example when oil spills while refueling a ship.
ITOPF maintains a database of oil spills from tank vessels, including combined carriers, FPSOs and barges. This contains information on accidental spillages of persistent and non-persistent hydrocarbon oil since 1970, except those resulting from acts of war. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) collects offshore incident statistics and uses the results of incident investigations and data analysis to identify incident causes and trends.
In this article, well explore the most recent and reliable facts and statistics about oil spills (from how many occur each year to the largest disasters in history), using data from trusted global sources such as ITOPF, NOAA, and Britannica. View the Oil Spills Fast Facts on CNN and learn more information about oil spill disasters. Thousands of spills occur in U.S.
waters annuallymost small, less than one barrel. This infographic shows where and when spills over 10,000 barrels or 420,000 gallons have occurred. On this page you can download a machine-readable version of the incident data shown in this website.
It covers selected oil spills off US coastal waters and other incidents where NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) provided scientific support for the spill response. Click on the yearly breakdown of OCS Spills 50 Barrels incidents below to see general details, including dates, locations, causes, and estimated spill sizes for the Gulf of America (GOA) Region and Pacific (PAC) Region. Subscribe to feeds for updates on EIA products including Today in Energy and What's New.
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