Preparing for a worst-case oil spill

摘要

The importance of stocking oil spill response equipment on offshore installations and OSVs was again highlighted in the wake of spills in Norway and Brazil last year. In the last four months of 2019 and into 2020 two large oil spillages (not thought to originate from offshore facilities) have threatened catastrophe for Brazilian beaches and ecosystems. When spillages occur from offshore installations they are mostly dealt with quickly, confined and then soaked up. But when they originate from other maritime sources this is not always the case. Brazilian authorities have still not identified the source of two spillages that struck the coast in Q4 2019. In Norway, two much smaller hydrocarbon spillages from the Statfjord field in the Tampen area of the North Sea were controlled and cleaned up rapidly in 2019. However, the country's Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) had to investigate how these incidents could occur from the same installation that was also struck by an OSV in 2019 - Equinor's Statfjord A platform.