Ecomare

When drilling for oil or gas, hundreds of tons of pulverized seabed materials are released in the water. One uses a kind of paste, the drilling mud, to pump these cuttings to the surface. The mud also serves as a lubricant and a cooling agent for the drill bit and offers counter-pressure when a pressurized oil or gas field is drilled. One used to use an oil-bearing liquid for this purpose, which strongly polluted the cuttings with oil. Nowadays, drilling muds based on water are used whenever possible. This mud contains no oil, though it does contain chemicals. The oil-bearing cuttings were dumped in sea till 1993, polluting the sea bottom within a radius of 200 meters around the platform.