Oil Spills

Max Roser; Hannah Ritchie

Oil Spills

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Oil spills are disasters that can have severe social, economic, and environmental impacts.

They are the release of crude oil or refined petroleum products from tankers, rigs, wells and offshore platforms.

These spills are most common in marine environments, but can also occur on land. They can have disastrous consequences for local ecosystems, and can be expensive due to the loss of oil, and the costs involved in their clean-up.

The number of oil spills, and the quantity of oil that is spilled from tankers has fallen substantially in recent decades.¹

On this page you can find all our data, visualizations, and writing relating to oil spills.

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Endnotes

This is based on data published by the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF).

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Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie (2022) - "Oil Spills". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'http://staging-site-cloudflare-pages/oil-spills' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owidoilspills,
    author = {Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie},
    title = {Oil Spills},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2022},
    note = {http://staging-site-cloudflare-pages/oil-spills}
}

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