UNITED NATIONS (AP) – Donors pledged an additional $5.6 million on Thursday that will allow the United Nations to begin transferring more than 1 million barrels of crude oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of Yemen war-torn, which poses a major environmental threat, but the UN said nearly $24 million is still needed to unload all the oil.
A large vessel called the Nautica, which was purchased by the United Nations Development Program in March to take oil from FSO Safer, is expected to arrive in the region in the coming days and the transfer operation is expected to begin earlier by the end of the month, said UN Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq.
UNDP said Egypt, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, South Korea, the United Kingdom and private company Octavia Energy and its subsidiary Calvalley Petroleum announced pledges totaling nearly $8 million, of which 5.6 million represent new financing.
With the new pledges, the UN has now raised $105.2 million for the operation to remove the oil from Safer, with an additional $23.8 million still needed, the UNDP said.
“But we are hopeful that as nations become aware of the need to avert a crisis in the Red Sea, they will get the funding we need,” Haq said.
For the second phase of the operation, UNDP said an additional $19 million will be needed to secure the Nautica and its recently transferred oil cargo and to tow the tanker Safer to a salvage depot 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 the Marib fields, a province in eastern Yemen. The impoverished country on the Arabian Peninsula has been engulfed in civil war for years.
Yemen’s conflict began in 2014 when Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of the north of the country, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to the Saudi Arabia The following year, a Saudi-led coalition entered the war to fight the Houthis and try to restore power to the internationally recognized government.
The ship, which is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long with 34 storage tanks, has not undergone any annual maintenance since 2015. Most of the crew, except for 10 people, were removed from the ship after the Saudis entered the conflict, and it is not known what the crew of the Nautica will find when they reach the tanker.
In 2020, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press showed that seawater has entered Safer’s engine compartment, causing pipe damage and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker and the inert gas that prevents the tanks from gathering flammable gases has leaked out.
Experts said maintenance was no longer possible because the damage to the ship is irreversible, according to an AP report.
