The Suez Canal is blocked

Maybe, maybe not. You have to first contain the spill (with oil booms) before deciding whether to ignite it or vacuum it into another ship. If the oil slick is too thin, it will not ignite. The best outcome would be to create a fire tornado over the spill, and have it become a "blue whirl", which burns hotter and faster than an ordinary fire. This is more theoretical than actually proven, however, as it has only been demonstrated on a small scale in a contained environment. If the water is not calm, the oil will mix too much with the water and will not burn.

To Clean Up An Oil Spill, Light a Fire Tornado

Burning oil will result in a number of toxic chemicals released into the air, in addition to the physical hazards of large-scale combustion. It might also make some of the water pollution worse. In order to burn the oil with minimal air and water pollution, it has to be done at a very high temperature to get complete combustion. To do that, you either need to have a fire tornado / blue whirl, or vacuum it up and pump it into an incinerator. A typical thermal oxidizer only burns a few gallons a minute of liquid waste, so it would have to be a very large incinerator (think 50-70' high, 40-60' wide, and 80-120' deep). If you could recover the oil at a high enough concentration (not sure what that would be), then it could likely be re-processed (decanting and azeotropic distillation) and most of the oil recovered. It would be expensive, though. Oil and salt-water would also be fairly corrosive to most typical metallic storage tanks (low-grade stainless steel, carbon steel, etc.).

In tropical areas away from shore (like the Deepwater Horizon incident), a large spill is normally dealt with using chemical dispersants. Not an ideal situation, but the least horrible and most manageable of the alternatives.

When there's an oil spill, why don't they burn the oil to get rid of it? - Quora

 

When I saw the title of this thread, my first thought was that the British had found a solution to their, ahem, solid waste problem:

Tourists Should Visit England: the "Dirty Man of Europe"

Sounds like something Boris might do on his way out: "Load everything you can into a ship, and dump it in the Suez Canal. That should clean up the beaches. Then we can sell the world's largest plunger to the Egyptians." Maybe I'm thinking of Dr. Evil.