“Сontained” Black Sea oil spill drifting from Russia’s Novorossiysk toward occupied Crimea

Experts from the organization Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe have examined satellite images and found that an oil spill in the Black Sea, first reported on Aug. 29 off the coast of Russia's Novorossiysk, continues to spread. Using images from the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites, The Insider was able to verify that the slick is already approaching the Kerch Strait.

Greenpeace has published images from Aug. 29 (the day of the spill), Aug. 30, and Sept. 1. The first two images clearly show that a large oil slick traveled from the spill site off the coast of Novorossiysk towards the Russian Black Sea city of Anapa. According to calculations by The Insider, the area of the slick near Novorossiysk on the day of the spill was approximately 43 square kilometers (Greenpeace estimates around 50 square kilometers). By Sept. 1, the oil slick had reached Crimea — just east of Cape Opuk at the southern entrance to the Kerch Strait. The oil moved along the coast between Abrau-Dyurso and the Utrish Nature Reserve.

Rospotrebnadzor — Russia's consumer rights supervisory body — reported that the leak occurred “due to the rupture of the marine connection of a floating hose during cargo operations at the offshore berth.” The oil spilled while it was being loaded onto the Turkish tanker T. Semahat. On Aug. 29, the Russian state agency claimed that around 30 cubic meters of oil had entered the Black Sea and that the contamination of the area had been contained.

However, in reality, the volume of spilled oil may be significantly higher than 30 cubic meters. Considering that the slick is visible from above, it likely has a thickness in the range of 0.01 mm to 1 mm. Therefore, the volume of oil spilled into the sea could actually be anywhere from 430 to 43,000 cubic meters.

These calculations lack precision and have a wide margin of error, as many factors need to be considered, most notably the weather and the type of oil. However, the new evidence disproves the claims by Rospotrebnadzor and the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) that the spill has been contained. In fact, the slick demonstrably continues to spread across the Black Sea.