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Data

Global annual average quantity of oil spilled from tankers per decade

See all data and research on:
Oil Spills

What you should know about this indicator

  • Decadal average quantity of oil lost to the environment from tanker spills.
  • Includes oil that was burned, remained in sunken vessels, or otherwise unrecovered.
Global annual average quantity of oil spilled from tankers per decade
Decadal average quantity of oil spilled.
Source
ITOPF (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 5, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1970–2020
Unit
tonnes

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

ITOPF – Oil tanker spill statistics

ITOPF maintains a database of oil spills from tank vessels, including combined carriers, FPSOs and barges. This contains information on accidental spillages of persistent and non-persistent hydrocarbon oil since 1970, except those resulting from acts of war. For historical reasons, spills are generally categorised by size, <7 tonnes, 7-700 tonnes and >700 tonnes, although the actual amount spilt is also recorded. Information is now held on over 10,000 incidents, the vast majority of which fall into the smallest category i.e. <7 tonnes. Information is gathered from published sources, such as the shipping press and other specialist publications, as well as from vessel owners, their insurers and from ITOPF's own experience at incidents. Historically, information from published sources mostly related to large spills, often resulting from collisions, groundings, structural damage, fires or explosions. In recent decades, however, reporting of smaller spills has improved.

Retrieved on
May 5, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.itopf.org/knowledge-resources/data-statistics/statistics/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
ITOPF (2025). Oil tanker spill statistics 2024. ITOPF Ltd,  London, UK

ITOPF maintains a database of oil spills from tank vessels, including combined carriers, FPSOs and barges. This contains information on accidental spillages of persistent and non-persistent hydrocarbon oil since 1970, except those resulting from acts of war. For historical reasons, spills are generally categorised by size, <7 tonnes, 7-700 tonnes and >700 tonnes, although the actual amount spilt is also recorded. Information is now held on over 10,000 incidents, the vast majority of which fall into the smallest category i.e. <7 tonnes. Information is gathered from published sources, such as the shipping press and other specialist publications, as well as from vessel owners, their insurers and from ITOPF's own experience at incidents. Historically, information from published sources mostly related to large spills, often resulting from collisions, groundings, structural damage, fires or explosions. In recent decades, however, reporting of smaller spills has improved.

Retrieved on
May 5, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.itopf.org/knowledge-resources/data-statistics/statistics/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
ITOPF (2025). Oil tanker spill statistics 2024. ITOPF Ltd,  London, UK

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

The decadal average quantity of oil spilled is calculated as the average over the subsequent ten-year period. For example, the figures for the 1990s is the average from 1990 (inclusive) to 1999.

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  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Global annual average quantity of oil spilled from tankers per decade”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2022) - “Oil Spills”. Data adapted from ITOPF. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

ITOPF (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

ITOPF (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Global annual average quantity of oil spilled from tankers per decade” [dataset]. ITOPF, “Oil tanker spill statistics” [original data]. Retrieved April 3, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/quantity-oil-spills-decadal-average.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear