Even so, oil spills remain an unpleasant reality of offshore oil drilling. Certainly, any amount of oil spilled into the ocean is undesirable, but offshore oil operations contribute relatively little of the oil that enters ocean waters each year. By far the largest source of human caused oil release is through “normal” use of oil products—people just dumping used oil away. According to the National Academies’ National Research Council, natural processes are responsible for over 63% of the petroleum that enters North American ocean waters and over 45% of the petroleum that enters ocean waters worldwide.
According to research by scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), 8 to 80 times the amount of
According to research by scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), 8 to 80 times the amount of