Over a Million Barrels of Oil Removed from Red Sea Tanker, Averting ‘Monumental’ Oil Spill Disaster

The United Nations said Friday it had pulled off a sensitive mission to pump oil off a decaying tanker in the Red Sea, successfully diffusing a potential environmental and humanitarian time bomb and averting what would have been one of the world’s largest-ever oil spills.

International experts have been working since last month to move oil off the FSO Safer, a 47-year-old vessel, which was abandoned off Yemen’s coast in 2015, following the outbreak of civil war in that country.

The ship held some 1.14 million barrels of oil, or about four times the amount of oil spilled in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez along Alaska’s coastline. The Valdez spill remains one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

By Friday, U.N. teams had moved more than 1 million barrels of oil from the FSO Safer and onto a second tanker that arrived in Yemen in July. The next phase of the operation involves stripping and cleaning the vessel’s tanks, which will be done over the coming two to three weeks.

“Years of neglect put the ship at risk of an imminent spill that would have damaged the entire Red Sea region and beyond,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Friday, welcoming the completion of the first phase of the operation.

And although the road ahead remains complicated—with the conflict in Yemen yet to be resolved, questions persist over who will ultimately take ownership of the recovered oil—U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the mission had helped stem what could have been a “monumental” disaster, affecting people and the environment in and around the war-torn nation.

The conflict, triggered when Iran-backed Houthi rebels attacked Yemen’s Sana’a based government in late 2014, had blocked salvage efforts for nearly a decade.

The region around the tanker is controlled by the Houthis, who had previously stood in the way of any rescue operation.

But recent efforts to reduce tensions between Saudi Arabia, which intervened in the conflict in 2015 on the side of Yemen's government, and Iran have helped bring about a period of relative calm. That in turn paved the way for a deal earlier this year under which the Houthis finally gave their nod to the U.N. mission.

U.S. and U.N. officials described the delicate operation as a race against time. The ship hadn’t been serviced in nearly a decade, and corrosion of the vessel from the exceptionally saline Red Sea had raised the possibility of a leak.