"Clearly the transportation market provides the key role for oil and its rapid growth over the past 20 years is expected to continue." [1] - Esso Exploration & Production
"Petroleum will remain a critical fuel far into the next century." [2] - Ford Motor Company
In 1993 Greenpeace presented the first version of this report on the occasion of three major oil disasters - Aegean Sea, Braer and Maersk Navigator. [3] Every year since then major new oil spills have occurred. Accidents such as the British Trent in June 1994, spilling 6.3 million gallons of oil off the Belgian Coast, the Nassia, January 1994, spilling 7.9 million gallons in the Bosporus and the Seki-spillage of 4 million gallons at Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman, March 1994. The most recent major spill in February 1996 was the running aground of the Sea Empress off the coast of Wales near Milford Haven, with a spill of 18.5 million gallons of oil. [4]
Because of the sheer amount of oil tanker traffic on the oceans at any one time, the frequency of accidents such as the Sea Empress spill - and consequently the loss of life within an ocean's ecosystem - becomes inevitable. According to casualty figures from April, about 30,000 sea birds were killed due to this spill. [5] These disasters are not merely accidents or so-called "acts of God"; they are a symptom of the industrial countries' addiction to oil and oil's disastrous love affair with the car. At any one time, 500 million barrels of oil (21 billion gallons) are being moved around the world by sea. [6] There is no doubt that this dependence is built on the growth and inefficiency of road transport fuelled by oil.
Total oil use in the OECD has remained virtually stable from 1970 to 1990 with a demand increase of 2%. However, road transport's share of oil consumption has risen dramatically: from 28% in 1970 to almost half in 1990. This is an increase of 65%. [7]
Traffic consumes 60% of worldwide oil consumption. The total petroleum demand for Europe has quadrupled since 1960, doubled in the US and increased sixfold in the Pacific. The Environmental-Prognoses-Institute (UPI) in Heidelberg, Germany, estimates that under a 'business-as-usual' scenario the worldwide fuel consumption will double within the next thirty years. [8]
A conservative estimate of total demand for petroleum products for road transport in the developed and developing regions stand at around 25 million barrels (just over 1 billion gallons) a day. This means that roads around the world are burning up the equivalent of 100 Exxon Valdez spills every day.
