Put some numbers on it! It will look sciencey!<p>Math does not work when applied to the data.<p>Most of the volume is from 60000 barrels stolen from pipelines (people drilling holes in the pipes and catching in buckets), undoubtedly some portion spilled. That is almost 3,000,000 gallons. The rest of the data is lost in the fudge factor that brings that down. (Two of the spill events are from about 10 gallons each, probably should list every car accident that splits a gas tank.)<p>1.2 million gallons sounds like a lot. In the US we've recently added vapor recovery devices to our cars to condense the gasoline out of the air in the tank. That keeps ~1 gallon per car per year out of the environment. The equivalent of making all of these spills every two days, but it is invisible. (That's why you may have stopped seeing vapor recovery nozzles at the filling station, your car is doing the work now.)
I find this a little odd - firstly, by far the largest volume of oil in the chart is the theft of 60,000 barrels per day reported by Shell from their pipeline in Nigeria. But theft != spill - presumably the oil was used for the same kinds of things it's normally used for, and wasn't tipped on the ground.<p>Secondly, the volume of the Shell thefts alone is 2.5m gallons per day, so either it wasn't actually added into the total (so why mention it?) or they got their math wrong.<p>Finally, 1.2m gallons sure seems like a lot, until you read that it's 2 Olympic swimming pools. Given the amount of oil processed around the world in a month I'm surprised we don't spill more of it.<p>BTW, Google never ceases to amaze me - I never expected it to understand "1185000 gallons in barrels of oil".