UN begins extracting oil from tanker, mitigating risk of environmental catastrophe

The United Nations announced Tuesday morning that it began operations to remove oil from a deteriorating supertanker, the first step toward preventing a natural disaster from unfolding in the Red Sea.

“In the absence of anyone else willing or able to perform this task, the United Nations stepped up and assumed the risk to conduct this very delicate operation,” U.N. Secretary–General António Guterres said about the project in a press statement.

FSO Safer, the 47-year-old tanker, has been a burden on the U.N.’s shoulders since 2015, when Yemen halted maintenance on the vessel due to an outbreak of a civil war in the country.

As a result, FSO Safer has been abandoned and stranded off the coast of Yemen for more than 8 years.

Despite numerous reports over the years warning that the tanker’s structural integrity is failing, Yemen’s rebel group, the Houthis, continued to block foreign attempts to access and inspect the ship.

The U.N.’s project to prevent a colossal oil spill by extracting the tanker’s 48 million gallons of oil was initially launched in 2019, but they also faced pushback from the Houthis when trying to access FSO Safer.

President Biden’s foreign policy regarding Yemen also complicated the matter. Shortly after being inaugurated, Biden stopped U.S. aid to Saudi Arabia’s offensive against the Houthis, which was the strategy of the two previous administrations.

This change, along with removing the Houthis’ designation as a foreign terrorist organization, signaled a shift toward diplomacy within U.S.’s approach to the country’s conflict.

But Biden’s policy switch-up did not have any immediate effect on the effort to stop the oil spill, which is projected to be four times the size of the Exxon Valdez leak. The 1989 incident was the second-largest oil spill in U.S. history.

On February 24th 2021, 20 days after the policy change, the Houthis made a new list of requests that delayed the U.N.’s mission.

After a drawn out process, the U.N. was finally able to begin offloading oil from FSO Safer with the help of a $10 million donation from the U.S. The U.N. anticipates the operation will last 19 days.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck mission and the culmination of nearly two years of political groundwork, fundraising and project development,” Guterres said in the press statement.

U.S. Department of State spokesperson Matthew Miller called on the global community and private industries in a press release to supply the additional $22 million needed to complete the project.

“The oil transfer is a critical step towards averting an economic, environmental, and humanitarian crisis in the Red Sea and beyond,” Miller said.

United Nations Development Program (UNDP) spokesperson Sarah Bel estimated that the potential oil spill would take $20 billion and multiple years to clean up during a press briefing in Geneva.

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