1.

Introduction Oil spills are the harmful release of oil into the environment, usually in the water, sometimes killing area flora and fauna. Oil is the most common pollutant in the oceans. More than 3 million metric tons of oil contaminates the sea every year. The majority of oil pollution in the oceans comes from land. Runoff and waste from cities, industry, and rivers carries oil into the ocean. Ships cause about a third of the oil pollution in the oceans when they wash out their tanks or dump their bilge water. It is an unfortunate by-product of the storage and transportation of oil and petroleum is the occasional spill. Oil spills are very difficult to clean up.

The kind of oil spill we usually think about is the accidental or intentional release of petroleum products into the environment as result of human activity (drilling, manufacturing, storing, transporting, waste management), that floats on the surface of water bodies as a discrete mass and is carried by the wind, currents and tides. Oil spills can be partially controlled by chemical dispersion, combustion, mechanical containment and adsorption. They have destructive effects on coastal ecosystems.

Examples of an oil spill would be things like well blowouts, pipeline breaks, ship collisions or groundings, overfilling of gas tanks and bilge pumping from ships, leaking underground storage tanks, and oil-contaminated water runoff from streets and parking lots during rain storms. Marine oil spill is a serious consequence of off-shore oil drilling and its oceanic transportation. Spill control firms specialize in the prevention, containment and cleanup of industrial oil spills.

2. Characteristics of oil spill The major spills of crude oil and its products in the sea occur during their transport by oil tankers, loading and unloading operations, blowouts, etc. When introduced in the marine environment the oil goes through a variety of transformation involving physical, chemical and biological processes. Physical and chemical processes begin to operate soon after petroleum is spilled on the sea. These include evaporation, spreading, emu1sification, dissolution, sea-air exchange and sedimentation. Chemical oxidation of some of the components of petroleum is also induced in the presence of sunlight. The degraded products of these processes include floating tar lumps, dissolved and particulate hydrocarbon materials in the water column and materials deposited on the bed.

Biological processes though slow also act simultaneously with physical and

chemical processes. The important biological processes include degradation by microorganisms to carbon dioxide or organic material in intermediate oxidation stages, uptake by large organisms and subsequent metabolism, storage and discharge.

3. Types of oil spill Crude oil and its products are highly complex mixtures. Since the fate of petroleum in the marine environment depends on the composition, a preliminary knowledge of major components and types is necessary for understanding the fate of petroleum when spilled on water. The approximate composition of an average crude oil is considered as :