UN seeks donors to stop ‘catastrophic’ Yemen oil spill

The United Nations and the Netherlands will hold a donors’ conference Wednesday to raise millions of dollars to stop an ageing oil tanker unleashing a potentially catastrophic oil spill off the coast of Yemen.

The 45-year-old FSO Safer, long used as a floating storage platform and now abandoned off the rebel-held Yemeni port of Hodeida with 1.1 million barrels of crude, was in “imminent” danger of breaking up, the UN warned on Monday.

The UN says it is seeking pledges of nearly $80 million (75.8 million euros) to transfer the oil from the “rapidly decaying” tanker — but that it would be far less than the colossal $20 billion it would cost to clean up a spill in the Red Sea.

“Funding commitments are needed to implement the plan before it is too late,” the UN and the Netherlands said in a joint statement.

“The vessel is at imminent risk of a major spill, which would create a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe centred on a country already decimated by more than seven years of war.”

The UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen David Gressly tweeted he would be in The Hague for the two-hour conference which was due to start at 1300 GMT.

The hulking FSO Safer contains four times the amount of oil that was spilled by the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, one of the world’s worst ecological catastrophes pristine Alaskan waters were devastated, the UN said.

Environmental group Greenpeace urged governments to back the plan.

“While this sounds like a lot of money, it is far less than the subsidies that governments give to oil corporations,” Greenpeace said in a statement.

The $79.6 million would fund the emergency part of a two-stage operation would see the toxic cargo pumped from the FSO Safer to a temporary replacement vessel for the next 18 months.

Gressly has said a total of $144 million would be needed for the full operation, which would include making the decrepit tanker fully safe.

Countries invited to the conference are Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Kuwait, Norway, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States, as well as the European Union.

The FSO Safer has not been serviced since 2015 after Yemen was plunged into civil war.

cvo-jhe/dk/jv