Stochastic Modelling of Oil Spill Incidences as Renewal Process

Oil spills constitute a major source of threat to livelihood in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. It exerts deleterious impact on the entire ecosystem. This paper presents a stochastic model based on renewal theory for modelling oil spill incidences. It considered oil spill incidences as a counting process whose inter-event times are independent and identically distributed exponential variables. The model was implemented on oil spills data from CHEVRON and TOTAL operations that was recorded from January, 2006 to May, 2014. The study revealed that the mean time to oil spills from CHEVRON Nigeria Limited and TOTAL Nigeria Limited operations were 6 and 43 days respectively. Estimates of occurrence of oil spills are helpful preliminary information for analysing impact of oil spills.