Watchdogs at work in the Gulf’s shipping lanes
The shipping lanes through the Arabian Gulf are some of the busiest in the world.
More than a third of the world’s seaborne oil shipments pass through the Strait of Hormuz.
In 2016, 50,700 ships passed the strait and 40,649 of those were tankers, according to regional monitoring watchdog, the Marine Emergency Mutual Aid Centre (Memac).
According to the marine traffic information service, in the seven days after the oil spill on January 26, 248 tankers passed through the Gulf.
About 140 are anchored off Fujairah port, with another 40 off Khor Fakkan, which is 20 kilometres north.
Some of these vessels have been there for years, and the anchorage area can extend into international waters. For example, the Liberia-flagged crude oil tanker City of Elite arrived in 2016.
Some ships are used for storage, while others wait there during periods of fluctuations in the market. The volume of activity makes the likelihood of a spill greater. This happens through ship-to-ship transfers gone wrong, illegal cleaning of hulls or other reasons.
“The reason why [ship-to-ship transfers] occur in Fujairah and Khor Fakkan is because it’s the doorstep to and from the Gulf waters,” said Samir Madani, co-founder of Tanker Trackers, a website that monitors oil movement at sea.
“So, if you have a tanker coming in from Asia that will want a couple of various grades [of oil] from countries like Iran, Saudi, Iraq, etcetera, they can have smaller tankers deliver it to them there and they can keep the oil separated in the smaller storage tanks aboard the tankers.”
The UAE is at the centre of efforts to clamp down on pollution as a result of these activities, to punish those who flout the law and to enforce regulations. There is also monitoring by the Coastguard and Navy.
More broadly, the Regional Organisation for the Protection of the Marine Environment (Ropme) and Memac co-ordinate efforts in the region. The Ropme headquarters are in Kuwait and Memac is in Bahrain. Ropme seeks to protect the marine and coastal ecosystems in the UAE, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It tracks oil spills, harmful algal blooms and other hazards that could threaten the sea area using Nasa satellites, which are monitored daily and through an automatic shipping identification system.
Wahid Moufaddal is a remote sensing expert at Ropme.
“In case of detection of any oil spill or significant marine or coastal pollution in the region, we report the case … and send an alert to Memac to contact the concerned response team in the polluted marine or coastal area to act,” he said.
“Major oil spills are not very common in the region,” Mr Moufaddal said, but it was rare not to find some pollution by oil “here or there” in the seas surrounding the UAE. There is now a concerted effort being made to clamp down on oil pollution in the Arabian Gulf.
An important moment was in 2007, when the UAE signed up to the International Maritime Organisation’s “international convention for the prevention of pollution from ships”.
Also known as the Marpol Convention, it sets limits for discharges from oil tankers including in the “special area” of the Arabian Gulf into the Sea of Oman.
“In special areas, you can’t wash out any oily mixture, it has to go through a filtering system. And it cannot be more than 15 parts per million, meaning you would not expect to see any visible trace,” an IMO spokesman said.
The convention also states that “any discharge into the sea of oil or oily mixture from the cargo area of an oil tanker shall be prohibited while in a special area”.
If traces of oil are discovered, then parties should investigate the issue. “The investigation should include, in particular, the wind and sea conditions, the track and speed of the ship, other possible sources of the visible traces in the vicinity, and any relevant oil discharge records,” the convention states. Since then, Memac said
The amount of oil pollution nowadays is much less than 10 years back CAPTAIN A M AL JANAHI Director, Marine Emergency Mutual Aid Centre
there has been a significant reduction in illegal discharges. There are also strict rules on the release of ballast water. Some ships have also been fined for illegally dumping into water. For example, oil tanker
Georgios, with a Liberian flag, was caught by Memac last year discharging oily and chemical waste into the Sea of Oman.
At the time, Memac director Capt AM Al Janahi, thanked the Omani and UAE authorities for efforts to combat sea pollution.
“The amount of oil pollution nowadays is much less than 10 years back,” Capt Janahi said.
But the high activity in the shipping lanes makes it difficult to monitor every single ship. Memac is studying the introduction of drones to increase the surveillance, and for Mr Moufaddal, it will take a concerted effort to completely eradicate the problem and meet the challenges, including the correct application of guidelines, maritime conservative rules and other regulations.
“Enforcement of the law, increased surveillance and efficient marine environmental monitoring can also significantly limit the annual number of such incidents/offences,” said Mr Moufaddal.