Burning appears biologically innocuous. However, technological difficulties are great and the application of wicking agents or oxidants are often required to sustain combustion. Burning only seems feasible on small, confined slicks.

Following the Torrey Canyon spill British authorities countered the fouling of beaches with a massive application of chemical dispersants. The dispersants are solutions of surfactants, which break oil down into droplets that enter water to form an emulsion. The biological damage resulting on treated shores was much greater than that due to oiling alone (), and subsequent field and laboratory research () has shown that many dispersants are more toxic than the oil they are meant to remove. Furthermore, dispersant and oil mixtures are often more toxic than the dispersant alone. The great toxicity of these "first generation" dispersants comes from the solvents used as a carrier for the surfactant component. Newer dispersants, such as Corexit and BP 1100, are far less toxic than their predecessors (); however, dispersant-oil mixtures may still be quite toxic.

More basically, dispersal of oil is often simply a cosmetic treatment and injects oil more firmly into the environment rather than removing it. Emulsification of oil may increase the amount of toxic compounds in solution and spread this pollution throughout the environment. There may be contingencies in which the use of chemical dispersants should be considered in order to prevent floating oil from damaging bird or sea mammal colonies. For example, contingency plans have been developed in the United Kingdom that provide for the dispersal of oil at sea slicks during certain times of the year and in restricted areas adjacent to important or endangered bird colonies (). Only in cases of such reasonable environmental trade-offs, or in cases of fire hazard or restoration of important amenities should the use of dispersants be permitted, and then only under strict supervision and control.

Oiled shores in Britain and in California have been cleansed with steam. This has virtually exterminated intertidal life, thus doing more harm than good. The consensus of shore ecologists now seems to be that physical removal by the use of absorbents is the only relatively non-destructive technique for cleansing oiled rocky shores, and that dispersants or steam should not be used ().

Oil has been removed from sand beaches by scraping off the oily sand and either disposing of it or removing the oil from the sand in separators (). While this almost certainly does some short-term biological damage, the damage may be outweighed by the benefit of removing potentially persistent contamination.