Oil Spills

Oil spills can hurt wildlife, the scenic beauty of coasts, and people's livelihoods. For these reasons, government, industry, and environmental groups have sought to find ways to prevent and respond to oil spills to avoid environmental damage while minimizing the costs of moving crude oil and refined products. Oil spills do not constitute the majority of oil pollution in the oceans. A report of the National Academy of Sciences found that “nearly 85 percent of the 29 million gallons of petroleum that enter North American ocean waters each year as a result of human activities comes from land-based runoff, polluted rivers, airplanes, and small watercraft.” Nevertheless, these spills are generally dispersed—attention-grabbing oil spills are the ones that are large, near the shore, and do visible damage.

The damage done by oil spills is a function of at least three things: the nature of the oil spilled; the proximity of the spill to the shore where most marine life lives; and the nature of the weather, current, and tides. For example, when the Argo Merchant spilled seven million gallons of fuel oil (which is thicker than crude oil) in the waters near Nantucket in 1976, the damage was minor because currents took the oil out to sea. On the other hand, smaller oil spills from barges, pipelines, and small tankers can do significant environmental damage.

Thicker oil near shore does more damage than oil offshore, and refined petroleum products like gasoline or kerosene, while highly toxic, tend to evaporate when spilled into water. Large oil spills far out to sea tend not to do a great deal of environmental damage, because the oil “weathers” and breaks up before it reaches a shoreline. The worst sort of spills, and the ones that receive the most attention, are of crude or heavy fuel oil in bad weather near a shoreline.