CAIRO (AP) – An international team is set to begin siphoning oil out of the hull of a decrepit tanker moored off the coast of Yemen this week, a UN official said Sunday. It will mark the first concrete step in an operation years in the making aimed at preventing a massive oil spill in the Red Sea.
More than 1.1 million barrels of oil stored in the tanker, known as SOF Safer, will be transferred to another vessel the United Nations purchased as a replacement to the rusting storage tanker, said Achim Steiner, administrator of the UN development program.
“We have reached a critical stage in this salvage operation,” Steiner told The Associated Press hours after the salvage team on Saturday managed to moor the replacement vessel alongside the Safer tanker in the Red Sea. “This marks, in a sense, the completion of the month-long preparatory phase.”
The rusting tanker is a Japanese-made vessel built in the 1970s and sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of export oil pumped from fields in Marib, a province in eastern Yemen. The ship is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long with 34 storage tanks.
The tanker is moored 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) from Yemen’s western Red Sea ports of Hudaydah and Ras Issa.
The vessel has not been maintained for eight years, and its structural integrity is compromised, making it at risk of breaking up or exploding. Seawater had entered the engine compartment of the tanker, causing damage to the pipes and increasing the risk of sinking, according to internal documents obtained by the AP in June 2020.
For years, the UN and other governments as well as environmental groups have warned that a major oil spill — or explosion — could disrupt global commercial shipping through the vital Bab el-Mandeb and Suez Canal routes, causing untold damage to the global economy. The tanker carries four times as much as the oil that spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska, one of the world’s worst ecological catastrophes, according to the UN.