Assessment of oil toxicity in water

Abstract The need for establishing toxicity data for crude oil and related petroleum products has triggered the development of a variety of test procedures. Unfortunately, a large fraction of the reported data is of little value for risk assessments due to incomplete information on test conditions and limited verification of exposure concentrations. The current chapter discusses some of the background issues that make toxicity testing of oil challenging, including some examples on how experimental conditions and choice of exposure metrics can affect reported toxicity values. In this process, we have revisited some of our earlier work to illustrate the aspects discussed. Finally, we describe how, in our opinion, experiments can be conducted to supply data to risk and damage assessment models for oil spills.