Oil Spill Disaster Monitoring along Nigerian Coastline”. Paper presented at

In 1956, Royal Dutch Shell discovered crude oil at Oloibiri, a village in the Niger Delta, and commercial production began in 1958. Today, there are 606 oil fields in the Niger Delta, of which 360 are on-shore and 246 offshore. Nigeria is now the largest oil producer in Africa and the sixth largest in the world, averaging 2.7 million barrels per day (bbl/d) in 2006. Nigeria's proven oil reserve is 35.2 billion barrels. Earnings from crude oil sales in Nigeria over the last 45years is about $600billion. Since the discovery of oil in Nigeria in 1956, the country has been suffering the negative environmental consequences of oil exploration and exploitation. Between 1976 and 2005, Nigeria recorded 9,107 oil spill incidents, which led to the spill of 3, 121, 909.8 barrels of oil. Several oil spill related laws and policies have been put in place to manage oil spill incidents in the country. Physical, chemical, and biological processes that depend on the oil properties, hydrodynamics, meteorological and environmental conditions govern the transport and fate of spilled oil in water bodies. These processes include advection, surface spreading, evaporation, dissolution, sedimentation, emulsification, photo-oxidation, and biodegradation