Security concerns were alarming enough for Finnish authorities to increase exercises and training for an emergency response to an oil spill or other environmental catastrophe, said Commander Mikko Hirvi, the deputy chief of the Finnish Coast Guard district that includes the Gulf of Finland.
“We have improved our preparedness,” Hirvi said, saying the Coast Guard has also assembled equipment needed to deal with a disaster, such as floating spill containment booms and vessels capable of picking up oil spilled at sea.
Oil and gas exports are the lifeblood of the Russian economy and for much of last year, Russian fossil fuel revenues were robust as the invasion of Ukraine pushed up prices. That’s why the United States, the European Union, Britain, Japan and a handful of other countries agreed to impose a price cap on Russian crude exports last year. Many countries have also imposed outright bans on Russian oil imports.
The restrictions have led to a dramatic shift in ships willing to load oil in Primorsk and other Russian ports in the Gulf of Finland. Now decades-old tankers that would otherwise have faced the scrap heap are arriving via the Baltic Sea, manned by crews that officials fear have little experience with the route’s crowded, shallow and icy conditions fluvial Tankers are also increasingly inadequately insured, experts say, raising the possibility that in the event of an oil spill or collision, there would not be enough resources to mount a rescue effort.
Although there have been no reported environmental incidents, even a small problem could be disastrous in the Gulf of Finland, whose shallow depth and fjord-like coastline would make cleanup very difficult.
“When we see new ships that haven’t been operating here before, we really don’t know the competence of the crew in ice navigation skills,” Hirvi said. “The potential risks are there and greater than before.”
The aging vessels plying the Gulf of Finland are part of a wider reconfiguration of vessels serving Russia’s fossil fuel exports. A growing fleet of tankers with shadowy ownership (shell companies in the Middle East or Asia that appear to have no previous shipping experience) is helping Russia legally move its oil exports to India and China, which do not they have imposed no sanctions on Russia. .
And a “dark fleet” of tankers, which sometimes turn off their transponders to obscure their movements, have switched their longtime market for Venezuelan and Iranian oil to Russian oil, in an illegal effort to sneak fuel restrictions. Russia itself does not have enough tankers to meet its needs, and Russian-owned vessels could face more sanctions than those whose ownership is less clear.
Russia’s efforts have produced mixed results, with its oil export earnings falling 42 percent in February compared with a year ago, according to figures released Wednesday by the International Energy Agency.
Older ships sometimes have problems, as Spanish authorities learned on March 4 when the crew of the Blue Sun, a 19-year-old tanker, sent a signal saying the ship’s engine had failed and they were adrift near the strait. of Gibraltar.
The ship, old enough to be in a scrapyard, had been bought by a Vietnamese company a few days earlier and registered its destination as the Russian Baltic Sea port of Primorsk, which does not appear in the records of its previous voyages. Vietnam’s close ties with Russia date back to the Soviet era, and the country has not imposed any sanctions on the Kremlin.
Around 11:45 a.m., the Spanish coast guard deployed a bright red tugboat after receiving a distress call from the Sol Blau, whose engine had stopped as its sailors were changing fuels.
When the rescue ship arrived, there was more smoke coming out of its chimneys than usual, said Pedro Echeverría Ibáñez, a spokesman for SASEMAR, Spain’s maritime search and rescue agency.
The ship, which in recent photos displayed “NO SMOKING: PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT” in giant red and blue letters across its bridge, was moving slowly southeast, open-source ship tracking data shows collected by FleetMon, a tracking service.
After about 2 1/2 hours, the crew fixed the problem and the ship resumed its course to the Gulf of Finland, where it sat for days in a narrow strip of international waters 30 miles to the southeast from Helsinki. On Wednesday, it sailed to Primorsk, one of Russia’s biggest oil-exporting ports, according to tracking data.
Sailing the Gulf of Finland
In the narrower area of the Gulf of Finland, an engine failure like the one experienced by the Blue Sun off the coast of Spain could be riskier, experts said, although they also said such problems are common and generally manageable.
The Gulf of Finland, which forms the easternmost tongue of the Baltic Sea, is only 30 miles wide in some areas, with traffic there from Russia limited to an even narrower strip of water between Finnish waters to the north and those of Estonia towards the north. south The gulf is full of ships and, near Russia, ice, a navigational obstacle course at this time of year.
“We have very little sunlight from November to February. We have five, six hours of daylight and the rest is dark,” said Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, a professor who focuses on Russian energy and environmental policy at the University of Helsinki.
And since the water is only 125 feet deep in the area, a spill would be like leaving a large amount of oil in a small bathtub, environmentalists say.
“What is worrying is local knowledge,” said Captain Johan-Elias Seljamaa, deputy commander of the Estonian navy. “The Baltic Sea and especially the Gulf of Finland is very limited. If you don’t have experience sailing in these waters, it’s a bigger risk.”
The Blue Sun seems typical of the type of vessel that has appeared in Russian ports following export restrictions. Until the end of February, it was owned by Sea World Management, a Monaco-based company, according to public records. She is now registered with Hung Phat Maritime Trading, an oil tanker company based in Vietnam. Last month, Spanish authorities detained a different vessel owned by Hung Phat, the Elephant, after linking that tanker to an oil transfer they believed violated European sanctions.
Hung Phat could not be reached for comment. A person who answered the phone at Sea World Management declined to comment.
More tankers covered by “unknown” insurers.
After the sale of the Blue Sun, its insurance status is no longer clear in public records. A growing number of tankers appear to be inadequately insured, a separate and growing risk, experts say. This means that there may not be the resources to pay for the massive cleanup of an oil spill.
Transporting Russian oil through international waters to countries like India and China that have not imposed sanctions is not illegal. But oil shipments priced above the cap can no longer be covered by the handful of large insurers with enough resources to pay for emergency efforts after an environmental catastrophe, since those insurers are based in countries that have underwritten the restrictions
No one else “has pockets deep enough to cover a major oil spill,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, senior analyst at the Center for Clean Air and Energy Research, a Finland-based environmental research group that has tracked Russian energy exports.
In the month before the invasion began, 19 percent of tankers leaving Russian ports were registered as covered by “unknown” insurers, usually a sign of inadequate or non-existent insurance, according to data from Myllyvirta’s group. So far this month, the share has increased to 45 percent, and will likely increase further as policies expire and cannot be renewed, he said.
The risks are increasing, he said.
“It’s an incredibly vulnerable body of water simply because of the small volume of water compared to other seas or oceans in the world,” he said. “This just means that a major oil spill could be a catastrophe or an even more serious incident.”
