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Preventing spills

Spills of oil and oil products can harm the environment, and put our employees and neighbouring communities at risk. We have been steadily reducing the amount spilled at our operations for reasons we can control, like corrosion or operational failures. Thanks to ongoing improvements in how we run and maintain our plants, these spill volumes are nearly 80% lower than they were in 1998.

We aim to prevent spills from happening and to contain and properly cleaning up any spills that do occur. Our global environmental standards and ship quality assurance standard set out the measures all companies we control – and all ships we use - need to take.

Spills from ships

Spills from oil tankers attract the most public attention but are thankfully rare. Ships that we manage carried nearly 40 million tonnes of cargo in 2008. There were no spills from these Shell-managed ships. This strong performance reflects the use of strict operating requirements, which are laid out in our Shell-wide ship quality standard. These include checks of all ships we use by qualified inspectors, to make sure those vessels are of well maintained and safe.

There was however, one large spill when a single-hulled barge we did not manage that was on short-term hire to Shell was hit by another ship. It lost approximately 300 tonnes of diesel into the Elbe River in Germany. To prevent this kind of spill in the future, we have been phasing in the hiring of double-hull barges on all rivers in Europe since 2006. We aim to complete this programme by the beginning of 2011, seven years ahead of European requirements for hiring double-hulled barges.

Spills at our facilities

Two types of spills happen at our facilities:

those we cannot control and which fluctuate with events (for example, due to hurricanes or sabotage); and
those from factors we control, like corrosion or operational failure.

Reducing the latter through clear procedures, consistent compliance and a lot of hard work. The number and volume of operational spills have fallen since 1998. This trend continued in 2008 as our increased focus on process safety appeared to be paying off.

It is more difficult to reduce spills caused by sabotage, hurricanes or other things we cannot control. No spills occurred because of hurricanes in 2008. Unfortunately, spills caused by sabotage remained a serious problem, with their volumes rising again in 2008 for the fourth consecutive year.

About half the total volume spilled in 2008 was caused by one sabotage incident in Nigeria, where a large pipeline was damaged by explosives. As a result of that incident, our spills from sabotage rose, pushing total spill volume higher. At sites in Nigeria that were shut down by the security situation, reliable information about spills will not be available until we can return to repair and restart operations.