Oil exploration and drilling continues on both onshore as well as offshore locations. The search for oil gets more intense as existing supplies get depleted, and new supplies become more difficult to find. The effort to locate oil reserves becomes more expensive since the drilling has to be done a lot deeper than done previously, to search for new reserves of oil. With the increase in costs of exploration and drilling at greater depths, the price of oil also increases in a greater proportion. This increase in prices cannot be reversed, and is a matter of great concern to all consumers of oil.
For offshore exploration and drilling of oil, the entire work is done under water at various locations in the seas and oceans. Oil rigs are installed at all locations where drilling is to be done down to the depths of the oil reserves. After drilling, the oil is pumped out through pipelines and taken to onshore locations where it is stored, and then transferred to oil refineries where it is processed into many petroleum products. During this entire process, sometimes failures happen which result in spills of large amounts of oil into the seas. The clean-up of these oil spills is an important exercise, since the spilled oil is dangerous.
Before the clean-up can be attempted, the leak of oil must first be plugged. This is a complex process, since the location of the leak is under water. After the location of the leak has been identified, necessary equipment and manpower needs to be deployed to the underwater location to plug the leak. A leak located in the pipeline might be easier to plug as compared to a leak located near the well-head. Due to enormously high pressures of oil at the well-head, the process is extremely dangerous and expensive. Clean-up of the spilled oil is then completed.