ON THE ASSESSMENT OF PREVENTED ECONOMIC DAMAGE FROM THE PROCESS OF CLEANING UP OIL-CONTAMINATED SOILS

The relevance of the work is determined by the significant role of the oil industry in the pollution of land resources, which leads to serious environmental, social, and economic consequences. Statistics demonstrate the scale of the problem: annual emergency oil spills, the disturbance of tens of thousands of hectares of land, and billion-dollar losses for the agricultural sector, indicating an acute need for accurate damage assessment and effective restoration methods.The purpose of the work is to critically analyze existing methodological approaches to assessing the economic damage from land pollution by petroleum products and to develop proposals for their improvement.To achieve this goal, the following tasks were accomplished. Firstly, to identify and systematize the main sources and consequences of land pollution from the activities of the oil industry. Secondly, to analyze the current methodological principles and regulatory framework for calculating environmental damage. Thirdly, to identify key shortcomings of modern methodologies, such as the methodological conflation of charges for waste disposal and actual damage, the static nature of assessments that ignores the time factor, and the neglect of social factors. Fourthly, to develop a set of measures for improving the methodological framework, including the separation of calculation approaches, the application of mathematical and statistical tools, the introduction of sociological research, and the accounting of the time factor through a discounting model.Authors conducted a study of pollution consequences, a critical analysis of the methodological foundations of damage assessment, and proposed specific ways to improve them. Furthermore, to demonstrate the economic efficiency of environmental restoration measures, a rapid assessment of an innovative method of electrochemical soil treatment was performed. It showed that the costs of cleanup are 71–92 % lower than the potential damage calculated using static methodologies.