UN seeks $29m as tanker heads to Yemen to remove oil from crumbling ship

The FSO Safer is carrying 1.1m barrels and has been abandoned off the coast of Yemen since war broke out in 2015

The UN has finalised a contract with a salvage company to empty the FSO Safer, but funds are badly needed. AP

An online donor conference will be held on May 4 to try to fill a $29 million gap in funding needed to safely remove oil from an abandoned tanker off Yemen's coast, the UN said on Thursday.

The FSO Safer has not been serviced since Yemen's devastating civil war broke out in 2015 and was left abandoned off the rebel-held port of Hodeidah, a critical gateway for shipments into the country heavily dependent on emergency foreign aid.

Seeking to avoid a damaging oil spill in the Red Sea, the UN Development Programme in March took the unprecedented step of purchasing its own supertanker to remove more than a million barrels of oil from the beleaguered 47-year-old ship.

Nautica, the supertanker purchased by the UNDP, is on its way to the region and should first make a stop in Djibouti in early May.

The entire operation is expected to cost $148 million, but prior funding drives have come up short.

“We urgently need to close the $29 million funding gap for the emergency operation and raise the additional funds needed to ensure safe long-term storage of the oil,” said David Gressly, UN co-ordinator for Yemen.

The UK and the Netherlands are organising the May 4 online conference, which has an “aim of fully funding both phases of the Safer project” according to a UN statement on Thursday.

The first recovery phase will cost $129 million, of which only $99.6 million has been pledged, the UN said. It estimates the second phase will cost a further $19 million.

“An enormous oil disaster is looming, which could have serious humanitarian, environmental and economic implications. But we now have a chance to prevent that disaster,” said Dutch trade and development minister Liesje Schreinemacher.

The UNDP also announced on Thursday that it had finalised a contract with SMIT Salvage, a subsidiary of the Dutch company Boskalis, to transfer the oil from the Safer to the Nautica and to prepare the tanker for towing once it has been emptied.

A SMIT vessel was due to leave on Thursday for the Red Sea loaded with “generators, hydraulic pumps and other specialised equipment to carry out the operation on the Safer, which no longer has functioning systems,” the UNDP said. The start of operations is expected sometime in May.

The Safer's 1.1 million barrels of oil is four times as much as that spilled in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, one of the world's worst ecological catastrophes, according to the UN.