PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
The project was initiated in response to the continued pollution of the European coastline, in particular around the North Sea and Channel area, by crude oil. It was a joint project between six European laboratories, experienced in oil spill identification, with the aim of identifying the sources of crude oil spills in European waters. The project was especially designed to handle oil spill cases where there is no suspected source. The objectver of the project were to: 1. Establish a database of crude oils produced or transported in European waters; 2. Evaluate existing, and develop novel statistical methods and computer software for comparing and matching fingerprints in the database. The EUROCRUDE model has been constructed. It consists of a database containing: 1. oil stock accounting data, details of the analytical conditions and analysis laboratory, and the fingerprint peak areas; 2. a fingerprint comparison software package based on F-statistics. The ability of EUROCRUDE to correctly identify pollution samples from real spill incidents was evaluated for a number of pollution samples, including those from the Danish nad German coasts and the Baltic Sea. In all of these a good match was found using the EUROCRUDE system.