Malta pitches in as millions pledged for oil transfer from tanker off Yemen

Malta is among countries that together have pledged an additional $5.6 million on Thursday, which will enable the United Nations to start transferring more than 1 million barrels of crude oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of wartorn Yemen that poses a major environmental threat, but the U.N. said that nearly $24 million are still needed so as to offload all the oil.

A large vessel called the Nautica, which was purchased by the U.N. Development Program in March to take on the oil from the FSO Safer, is expected to arrive in the region during the coming days and the transfer operation is expected to start before the end of the month, U.N. deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, said.

The UNDP said that Egypt, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the private company, Octavia Energy, and its subsidiary, Calvalley Petroleum, have announced pledges totalling almost $8 million, of which $5.6 million represents new funding.

With the new pledges, the U.N. has now raised $105.2 million for the operation so as to remove the oil from the Safer, with an addition $23.8 million still being needed, the UNDP said.

“But we’re hopeful that as nations are aware of the need to avert a crisis in the Red Sea, they’ll come up with the funding we need”, Haq said.

For the second phase of the operation, UNDP said that an additional $19 million will be needed to secure the Nautica and its newly transferred cargo of oil, as well as to tow the Safer tanker to a salvage yard for recycling.

The Japanese-made Safer was built in the 1970s, and then sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of oil pumped from fields in Marib, a province in eastern Yemen. The impoverished Arab Peninsula country has for years been engulfed in civil war.

Yemen’s conflict had started in 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital, Sanaa, and much of the country’s north, thus forcing the government to flee to the south, and then to Saudi Arabia. The following year, a Saudi-led coalition had entered the war to fight the Houthis, and to try to restore the internationally recognized government to power.

No annual maintenance has been done since 2015 on the ship, which is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long, with 34 storage tanks. Most crew members, except for 10 people, were pulled off the vessel after the Saudis had entered the conflict, and it’s uncertain what the crew of the Nautica will find when they get to the tanker.

In 2020, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press showed that seawater has entered the Safer’s engine compartment, causing damage to pipes and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker, and the inert gas that prevents the tanks from gathering inflammable gases has leaked out.

Experts said that maintenance was no longer possible because the damage to the ship is irreversible, as according to an AP report.