Practical Solutions for Prevention of Oil Seepage Catastrophes in the Marine Environments with a special look to the Caspian Sea

Deep sea offshore oil exploration causes some catastrophes beyond man’s ability to take necessary corrective measures. Deepwater Horizon’s explosion causing sever seepage in deepbottoms of the Gulf of Mexico is the last one. Contemporary man is a big consumer which makes an opportunity for the oil companies to getgovernment's approvals for exploration in deepest possible while no or insufficient environmental assessments are carried out.Some scientists believe that about half of the oil entering ocean comes from offshore deposits natural seepage. The rest comes from well blowouts, breaks in pipelines, tanker spills, etc.Offshore contamination has captured less attention. Generally headline news are the dramaticevents such as large spills-well blowouts or wrecked tankers. It seems that slow natural seepage from offshore deposits does not cause significant pollution.Apparently marine environment has enough potential to eliminate the harmful effects of such seepage and therefore this natural slow seepage does not seem to be a threat to the environment.Due to the public outcry, governments and IMO’s efforts, tougher standards and rules for new tankers went into effect and new safety standards for older tankers were phased for a few years. But the same tough attitudes were not directed to offshore oil industry.There is a serious doubt that companies working on the offshore oil are truthful to the public.Their product is consumed with the help from regulators. Public opinion towards theenvironmental assessments of offshore projects and offshore industry’s remediable capability forthe prevention of catastrophes is under question. Neither regulators nor the offshore industry paid sufficient attention to the views given by the independent environmental protection groups

کلیدواژه ها:

deep sea ، environmental assessment ، the Caspian Sea ، exploration ، environmental catastrophe