The United Nations (UN) announced that the operation to salvage an oil tanker in Yemen to prevent an oil spill in the Red Sea can begin after the arrival of a team tasked with protecting the vessel that has been abandoned for years. The mission involves transferring more than one million barrels from the FSO Safer to the supertanker Nautica, recently acquired by the UN, and is expected to begin in about ten days to two weeks, David Gressly, coordinator for Yemen, said in a video conference.
In March, the UN announced the acquisition of a huge oil tanker to salvage the vessel anchored off the port of Hodeida, in western Yemen, with the aim of avoiding a possible oil spill as well as the risk of explosion and fire.
The specialized company SMIT Salvage, a subsidiary of the Dutch company Boskalis, will be in charge of carrying out the operation, whose total cost is estimated at 148 million dollars.
Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), commented that this is a special day and an important milestone in the FSO Safer saga. It is expected that, if all goes according to plan, by the end of June or early July, the crucial ship-to-ship transfer phase can be declared complete.
According to the UN, the Safer contains four times the amount of oil from the Exxon Valdez, which caused one of the largest environmental disasters in US history in 1989. Cleaning up an oil spill of this magnitude would cost $20 billion, in addition to having devastating consequences for the environment, the economy, and humanity.
In total, it is estimated that the salvage operation will cost more than 140 million dollars, of which 14 million are still missing to finance the first phase and a total of 29 million dollars, according to the UN.