He wants to see a much tougher system of regulation to reduce the dangers, with unlimited liability on oil companies. He believes the global oil industry gets away with a lax system, balancing risk gainst cost. At present there is no single international body to deal with spills, though there have been calls by some environmentalists for the United Nations to intervene. It is largely up to individual countries and private companies to sort out problems in their waters. In the UK, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency has a national contingency plan to deal with disaster.
Local authorities have their own emergency plans and carry out drills.
It has a stockpile of equipment capable of responding to two simultaneous spills of 30,000 tonnes each. The company was set up by BP in 1980 as a direct result of an oil spill in 1978 off the Pembrokeshire coast in the UK and is now owned by more than 20 international oil companies. There are several factors that cause oil spills, said Mr Horseman. But the main problem, he said, is simply the amount of oil that world industry uses, and the nature of oil itself. There are many different types of oil, but in simple terms there is ordinary crude oil which is carried by large ships to oil refineries.