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Data update—Oil Spills

July 1

Track oil spills from tankers since the 1970s

Oil spills from tankers — ships transporting oil — have fallen dramatically since the 1970s, in both number and volume (the latter shown in the chart here).

This data comes from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (now known officially as ITOPF), a non-profit that represents most of the world's tanker owners and has tracked oil spills since 1970.

ITOPF builds its dataset from shipping publications, insurers, vessel owners, and from sending its own staff to attend spills as they happen.

Note that the data covers only tankers and similar oil-carrying vessels. It doesn’t include bunker fuel spills from other ships, or oil from pipelines or offshore platforms such as the Deepwater Horizon.

I recently updated our charts with ITOPF's latest release, which runs through 2025. They publish new statistics annually, so we'll update again in 2027.

Explore the updated data in our interactive charts
Bar chart of tonnes of oil spilled from tankers per year where the largest spills occurred in the 1970s and 1980s and there is a clear long-term decline to much smaller annual spills from about 2000 to 2025. Data source: ITOPF (2026). License: CC BY.
Veronika Samborska