ABSTRACT Before considering any possibility of increasing her capacity to combat an oil spill offshore, the French Navy asked CEDRE to inventory the different types of vessels used worldwide, and more especially in Europe, to recover oil spilled offshore. Two types of ships can be differentiated:those which were specifically conceived for recovering oil,and those which have been adapted or used for this mission.In the last case, we can also make a distinction between vessels which are only, or mainly, used for antipollution combat and those which are normally used for commercial activities, e.g., dredgers or coastal tankers.Except for Germany, the only country to have ships that were specifically conceived for recovering oil offshore, most countries make use of dredgers or supply vessels. Storage capacities for recovered oil are generally between 500 and 1,000 m3, except for dredgers which may have storage capacities of 6,000 m3 and even more. The oil recovery devices associated to these vessels generally combine oil containment and recovery and are deployed alongside. Most of them are mechanical weir skimmers and use high-capacity transfer pumps.Taking into account the conditions of intervention off the French coastline, the comparison of the different solutions pointed out numerous advantages of supply vessels having large storage capacity inboard, even if improvements are still needed to increase the capacity of controlling a large oil spill with bad sea conditions.