In an effort to prevent an environmental catastrophe, the UN announced on Thursday, March 9, that it had acquired a big tanker to hold roughly 1.1 million barrels of oil that would be transported from a decrepit vessel off the coast of Yemen.
The international organisation has been alerting people for a number of years that any oil spill from the Safer tanker could wreak havoc on Yemen’s coastline and the Red Sea.
But, as the UN began to seek funds to transport the oil, the cost of vessels increased, primarily, it was claimed, because of reasons related to Russia’s conflict in Ukraine.
Top officials claimed they now had the majority of the money. ‘We already have $95 million mobilised. We’re projecting that we need another $34 million to complete the project,’ the top UN official in Yemen, David Gressly, told reporters.
They had now secured the vessel and expected it to sail within the next month, UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner said.
‘We hope, if all things go according to plan, that the operation of the ship-to-ship transfer would actually commence in early May,’ Steiner added.
The Safer supertanker was being used as a floating storage and offloading facility and is moored off Yemen’s Red Sea oil terminal of Ras Issa. Production, offloading and maintenance operations were suspended in 2015 due to the war in Yemen.
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