Donors on Thursday pledged an additional US$5.6 million to enable the UN to start transferring more than 1 million barrels of crude oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of war-torn Yemen, which poses a major environmental threat, but the UN said nearly US$24 million is still needed to offload all the oil.
A large vessel called the Nautica, which was purchased by the UN Development Program (UNDP) in March to take on the oil from the FSO Safer, is expected to arrive in the region in the coming days and the transfer operation is expected to start before the end of the month, UN deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.
The UNDP said Egypt, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, South Korea, the UK and private company Octavia Energy and subsidiary Calvalley Petroleum announced pledges totaling almost US$8 million, of which US$5.6 million represents new funding.
Photo: AFP
With the new pledges, the UN has now raised US$105.2 million for the operation to remove the oil from the Safer, with an additional US$23.8 million still needed, UNDP said.
“We’re hopeful that as nations are aware of the need to avert a crisis in the Red Sea, they’ll come up with the funding we need,” Haq said.
For the second phase of the operation, UNDP said an additional US$19 million would be needed to secure the Nautica and its newly transferred cargo of oil and to tow the Safer tanker to a salvage yard for recycling.
The Japanese-made Safer was built in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of oil pumped from fields in the eastern province of Marib.
The impoverished Arab Peninsula country has for years been engulfed in civil war.
No annual maintenance on the ship has been done since 2015, which is 360m long with 34 storage tanks.
Most crew members, except for 10 people, were pulled off the vessel after the Saudis entered the conflict, and it is uncertain what the crew of the Nautica will find when they get to the tanker.
In 2020, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press showed that seawater has entered Safer’s engine compartment, causing damage to pipes and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker and the inert gas that prevents the tanks from gathering inflammable gases has leaked out.
Experts earlier said that maintenance was no longer possible because the damage to the ship is irreversible.
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