ALERT Project

ALERT’s citizen suit clears the way for safer products during oil spill response

August 13, 2026 – Recently, an Oregon state oil spill response planner asked me, “Have you seen EPA’s new product schedule?” I had not. “Something weird happened to it,” he said. “There’s almost nothing on it.” We both googled it and discovered that EPA’s new list of products for oil spill response contained five products. “See?” the state planner said. “What happened to the other 130 products?”

What happened was the successful lawsuit brought by ALERT and allies in 2020. Our citizen suit changed the rules governing use of dispersants (our focus) and other products – such as surface washing agents, solidifiers, herding agents, and bioremediation agents – during oil spill responses. EPA tightened the protocols for testing products to eliminate more toxic products, required full disclosure of ingredients (no hiding toxic ingredients as “confidential business information”), and significantly, added rules for removing products from the schedule –  an option previously unavailable to citizens. Rules for removal require evidence that technical information supplied to EPA by the manufacturer was incorrect, inaccurate, misleading, or outdated concerning impacts to human health and the environment. In other words, anything less than truthful.

Under court supervision, EPA allowed a lengthy three-year conditional use period, counting the six-months between promulgation of the new rules and when they went into effect on December 11, 2023. [88 FR 38336, June 12, 2023] That conditional use period – which grandfathered in all 130+ products that were listed as of June 12, 2023 – ended on June 10, 2026. The new EPA Product Schedule lists four dispersants and one surface washing agent. Apparently, the manufacturers of the other 130+ products could not or chose not to meet the new requirements.

Was it all smoke and mirrors? Decades of deception that oil spills can be “cleaned up” with chemical products that miraculously create a net benefit instead of more harm than good? Manipulated lab tests? Biased statistics and formulas? Carefully worded labeling that could make black appear to be white? A growing “wealth defense industry” with legions of lawyers who could make thousands of toxic tort cases disappear from workers and the public who were directly exposed to their product? Apparently so.

The famous “Gulf Walrus” are another myth found only in oil spill contingency plans for the Gulf of Mexico at the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. The error was corrected but the industry’s disrespect for human health and the environment remains.

Case in point: Corexit dispersants were the go-to in the US for oil spill response and comprised 45% of global stockpiles. No more. The former owner of Corexit dispersants, ChampionX, voluntarily pulled the plug on its Corexit product line in November 2022 when EPA’s proposed rules were moving inexorably under court supervision towards promulgation. Then, ChampionX vanished altogether when it was acquired by SLB (Schlumberger) in 2025. Corexit was just one of the 130+ products. The others just disappeared more quietly on June 10, 2026.

We did this – ALERT and the hundreds of concerned citizens over fifteen years who stepped up and signed onto petitions for this rulemaking and the lawsuit. We wiped out 130+ likely toxic products on EPA’s list.

So, where does this leave us?ALERT and the Government Accountability Project filed a noncompliance complaint with OSHA about its less than truthful reporting on technical literature for three of the five dispersants that are currently on EPA’s list. (The other two products were listed after we filed our complaint.) Our complaint is still under active investigation.

At this tipping point, we remain committed to eliminating products that will cause more harm than good during oil spill response. Why? Beyond the obvious, holding the oil industry accountable for multi-organ harm across body systems and species including humans from exposure to its products helps build pressure towards leaving the oil in the ground and transitioning to independence from fossil fuels.

In solidarity,