UN begins pumping oil from FSO Safer tanker off Yemen

The 47-year-old vessel contains 1.1 million barrels of oil

The UN-purchased replacement vessel Nautica in the Red Sea off the Yemen coast. EPA

The UN has begun pumping oil from the decaying FSO Safer tanker that has been abandoned for eight years off the coast of Yemen, and moored there since the 1980s.

The 47-year-old Safer contains 1.1 million barrels of oil. It was left to the elements after the war between the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebels broke out in 2014.

Private company Smit Salvage said this week it would pump the oil from the Safer to the Nautica, a supertanker the UN bought for the operation, then tow away the empty tanker.

“A complex maritime salvage effort is now under way in the Red Sea off the coast of war-torn Yemen to transfer one million barrels of oil from the decaying FSO Safer to a replacement vessel,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said.

The Safer has for years been at risk of breaking up or exploding. Experts have warned that a major spill from the vessel would result in an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe four times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 and destroy reefs, coastal mangroves and other sea life in the Red Sea while affecting Yemen's access to food, fuel and aid.

Additionally, clean-up operations would cost about $20 billion and fish stocks would need 25 years to recover, the UN estimated.

“In the absence of anyone else willing or able to perform this task, the United Nations stepped up and assumed the risk to conduct this very delicate operation,” Mr Guterres said.

“With the UN in the lead the world has pulled together to avoid a nightmare scenario that has been talked about for the last eight years,” David Gressly, UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, told reporters in New York from the bridge of the Endeavour vessel overseeing the transfer.

He said the transfer of the oil from the Safer that began on Tuesday “is not the end of the operation”.

“The installation of a calm buoy to which the replacement vessel will be safely tethered is the next crucial step. I thank donors, private companies and the general public for providing the funds that have brought us to this milestone,” Mr Gressly said.

For every barrel of oil pumped off the Safer, “the threat of a potential spill … recedes,” UNDP said.

“The challenges on this project have been huge but the response by so many who have made this rescue operation possible has been equally huge. And it is a reminder of what the United Nations can achieve through its convening power and its capacity to co-ordinate a complex operation,” UN Under Secretary General and UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said.

The oil transfer is expected to take 19 days to complete. Then the oil, which is majority owned by Yemeni state firm SEPOC, might be sold.

What's next for the Safer?

Speaking to The National, former chairman of Yemen's Environment Protection Authority, Abdelkader Al Kharraz, said it is unlikely that the Nautica will set sail once the oil is fully transferred, especially after the ship's handover to “the people of Yemen”, according to Mr Gressly.

“Until we see the Nautica leave Ras Issa after the oil has been loaded on to it and off the Safer, I worry that we may have just prolonged an existing problem. But instead of keeping 1.1 million barrels of oil on a decaying ship, we're keeping it on a 15-year-old vessel instead.”

The rusting Safer tanker is a Japanese-made vessel built in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to three million barrels of export oil pumped from fields in Marib, a province in eastern Yemen.

The ship is 360 metres long with 34 storage tanks.

The tanker is moored 6km from Yemen’s western Red Sea ports of Hodeida and Ras Issa, a strategic area controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who are at war with the internationally recognised government.