Abstract

Assessing the changing risk of oil spills and oil movements.
Track: Petroleum
Authors: Lisa Stevens

Understanding the risk of accidental oil spills from ships has long been of interest to the maritime community. Risk is often described as the combination of consequence and probability. GIS has been used to model and analyse the amount of oil transported as cargo across our oceans in terms of total volumes carried and traffic density for several dataset years. By overlaying this with historical tanker spills since the 1970s and environmentally sensitive resources, a greater representation of risk can be visualised. Using web tools such as ArcGIS Flex API has proved a powerful tool for visualising risk and helping to identify areas of focus for preventative actions without the need of specific GIS training.