Data gap hides oil accident peril in the Americas

The briefing highlights a dangerous pattern of missing or inconsistent data on oil accidents across the Americas, noting that only Brazil, Canada, and the United States maintain regularly updated open datasets. Even in these countries, critical information such as ecological damage, human health impacts, and the responsible companies is often omitted. The document emphasizes that this lack of transparency violates international norms and obscures the systemic vulnerabilities of an interconnected petroleum supply chain, particularly in sensitive regions like the Amazon where ageing infrastructure poses significant risks.

• There is a systemic lack of transparency regarding oil accidents across the Americas; of 35 countries, only Brazil, Canada, and the United States provide regularly updated, open datasets.
• Even the most comprehensive datasets in the region suffer from significant gaps, often omitting data on human life loss, property damage, and ecological impact. The only two data points consistently collected across the datasets of the US, Canada, and Brazil are the number of accidents and the volume of oil spilled.
• Brazil's oil incident dataset is the most complete in the Americas, recording an average of 5.5 incidents per day, but it contains inaccuracies such as missing incident dates in over 10% of cases and a lack of measurement units for spilled volumes.
• In Mexico, official records likely underreport oil accidents; one investigation found that approximately 60% of spills detected via satellite imagery between January 2018 and July 2024 were not reported by the responsible companies.
• The Amazon region is particularly vulnerable to oil accidents due to logistical challenges and ageing infrastructure. In the Peruvian Amazon, 474 oil spills were recorded between 2000 and 2019, while Ecuador's Trans-Ecuadorian Pipeline System (SOTE) saw 65 incidents between 1972 and 2019, spilling roughly 730,000 barrels.
• The interconnected nature of the Americas' oil supply chain, including cross-border pipelines like the Keystone, Trans-Panama, and Trans-Andean pipelines, means that accidents often have regional socio-economic and environmental repercussions that transcend national borders.

APA

Ribiero, R. (2025). Data gap hides oil accident peril in the Americas. Zero Carbon Analytics. https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/insights/briefings/data-gap-hides-oil-accident-peril-in-the-americas/

Chicago

Ribiero, Renata. Data gap hides oil accident peril in the Americas. Zero Carbon Analytics, 2025. https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/insights/briefings/data-gap-hides-oil-accident-peril-in-the-americas/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Ribiero |first1=Renata |title=Data gap hides oil accident peril in the Americas |publisher=Zero Carbon Analytics |date=14 November 2025 |url=https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/insights/briefings/data-gap-hides-oil-accident-peril-in-the-americas/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{ribiero2025data, author = {Ribiero, Renata}, title = {{Data gap hides oil accident peril in the Americas}}, institution = {Zero Carbon Analytics}, year = {2025}, month = nov, url = {https://zerocarbon-analytics.org/insights/briefings/data-gap-hides-oil-accident-peril-in-the-americas/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }