Most new oil and gas projects in 2024 were located offshore, where spills can be hard to detect. Researchers at the nonprofit SkyTruth recently published a report identifying the biggest sources of pollution from offshore oil, including oil leaks, transportation emissions and methane flaring, as well as the most polluted locations. Christian Thomas, a geospatial engineer at SkyTruth who worked on the report, told Mongabay that before now, “there hasn’t been an accounting really of the full impacts [from] the global offshore oil and gas industry.” To understand the impacts, the researchers looked at both fixed oil production infrastructure and floating production and storage vessels (FxOs) — newer, more modular ways to extract and transport ocean oil. Using satellite data from June 2023 to October 2024, researchers identified the most polluting facilities by calculating the frequency and extent of observable oil slicks associated with them. Globally, there are more than 24,000 fixed structures and only approximately 300 FxOs, yet SkyTruth found that four of the top 10 most polluting facilities are FxOs. The most polluting FxO lies in Nigeria, where the researchers observed “oil slicks in 18% of all satellite images, suggesting it may release oil every five days on average.” Nigeria is home to five of the top 10 most polluting offshore facilities, the report found. As Mongabay has previously reported, Nigerian regulatory agencies rely on the oil industry to self-report spills. Environmentalists told Mongabay that spills could grow as international oil majors sell aging offshore facilities to local companies,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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