Oil Spill Case Study

Identify and Define Problem:

Oil spills is contamination of the environment, especially marine area due to oil spillage from various kind of sources. The world production of crude oil increases from 59 million barrels at year 1980 to 79 million barrels at year 2015. Massive production of crude oil will need massive transportation and of course associated with risk of oil spills. Nearly 100 million gallons of oil spill into the ocean and other waterways per year. The graph below shows the oil spills incident is increasing throughout the years:

Oil spills can be caused by several reasons:

• Aging/breakdown of oil tankers and equipment

• Careless mistakes done by humans

• Natural disasters

• Deliberate acts by terrorists

• Pipeline breaks and leaks

• Ships collision

When the oil spilled into the ocean, it spread out on the water surface very rapidly to form a thin layer of oil which is known as oil slick. The split oil will cause several impacts to the beaches, habitat and wildlife. When the oil spills reaches the beach, it will cling to the sand and rocks together and eventually they clump together which will poison the beach. When the spilt oil washes the mangrove swamp or other wetlands, the fibrous plants will absorb the oil which can damage the plant

The first step is to track the source of split oil through some analytical methods. However there is several problems encountered to track the source. First of all, oil contains mixtures of various types of chemicals and can have distinctive compositions which might came from different oil field or ship. Furthermore, the complex current and tide movement of the ocean stirred the oil making the oil spread around. This makes it harder to track its source. Last but not least, there might be come alteration caused by the physical processes by the oceans as well as some reactions or interactions with organisms in the sea may