• about 10% of the annually extracted volumes of oil and natural gas in Russia escapes into the environment during extraction and pipeline transportation; • the extent of conversion of crude oil at Russian Federation refineries constitutes 68% (90% in Western companies), which means that over 30% of the total volume of extracted oil goes as wastes; • existing methods of estimating the ecological damage in the Russian Federation give values reduced by comparison with the fines levied in foreign practice. Also, the costs for dealing with the adverse consequences of emergency spills and ongoing leaks fall on the state budget, i.e., the public; and • accepted international obligations on environmental protection are often not met because of the lack of government finance. However, the Russian ecological doctrine adopted by the government of the Russian Federation in August 2002 strengthened the position of the Natural Resources Ministry in that it required in 2003 the obligatory observation of ecological safety standards by oil companies, extending to threatening to withdraw their licences to operate deposits [1]. For that reason, oil companies in the near future will be obliged to increase their expenditure on restoring the environment, including extracting oil hydrocarbons from water, soil, drilling sludge, and so on. We compare Russian and foreign technologies for performance by the use of characteristic parameters such as the extent of the cleanup from oil hydrocarbons and the price. It is clear that to minimize expense in environmental protection measures, one must first compare the performance of those two types of technology on the basis of the price and the cleanup extent. It is also necessary to estimate the optimum degree of cleanup, which should enable one to perform restoration measures in the form of ecological innovations, i.e., a set of measures based on innovative technologies, which should produce simultaneous ecological and economic effects. It is evident that high-performance technologies are best at preventing various forms of ecological damage (as measured from the viewpoint of economy). In turn, the economic effect is provided by the production of some saleable product formed after cleanup. When natural objects are cleared of oil pollution, a profit may be obtained by selling the extracted hydrocarbons. An additional profit can be obtained in drilling oil wells by the repeated use of drilling solution and lengthening the working life of the drilling equipment. Such profit should pay off the costs of setting up and using protective equipment in a short period. Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Vol. 40, Nos. 5–6, 2004