How do oil and gas affect the ocean?

Accidental oil spills during drilling can contaminate vast areas of the ocean and cause huge harm to marine life. 

Drilling and seismic activities can disrupt the seabed, which often causes harm to sensitive habitats like deep-sea sponge communities and cold-water corals. These delicate ecosystems can take decades to fully recover. 

Seismic surveys are also incredibly noisy. Oil and gas companies use seismic air guns to explore for oil offshore. The noise from this, and also from later phases can cause severe harm to and even kill marine mammals like dolphins and whales, as they use sound to navigate, find each other, and locate food. 

The extraction of oil can also often cause accidents in the form of huge oil spills, just as the exploration stage can. These spills can travel incredibly long distances, causing destruction and pollution as they go. 

Oil and gas operations may release various chemicals into the water, including toxic substances like PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and mercury, which can harm marine organisms and disrupt ecosystems. 

Oil and gas operations are known contributors to the global plastic pollution crisis. This is because microplastics are released as part of the extraction process. These tiny particles of plastic can end up anywhere in the ocean. They have been found in the lungs of fish, and even in the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the ocean. 

Oil rigs also produce wastewater, which is full of oil and chemicals and can leak out into the ocean.  

Facilities built to extract oil and gas, including roads, pipelines, and rigs can damage and destroy important habitats, like seagrass beds, kelp forests, coral reefs and deep-sea ecosystems.  

Once built, these infrastructures cause serious impacts to sensitive marine biodiversity and interfere with the movement of migratory animals, such as whales and dolphins.