Wanted: $20M to stop environmental catastrophe in the Red Sea

The United Nations says it needs $80 million to prevent an oil spill in the Red Sea potentially four times greater than the Exxon Valdez disaster. It is $20 million short.

Moored 4.8 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen, the FSO Safer is a supertanker built in 1976 that was later converted into a floating storage and offloading facility, or FSO. It’s been abandoned due to the war since 2015, carrying an estimated 1.14 million barrels of light crude oil.

The estimated cleanup cost when it either leaks or explodes is $20 billion. Either of those occurrences is just a matter of time, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, told Devex in an interview in Brussels last month. Fishing communities would lose their income, towns would be exposed to toxins, and the nearby ports of Hodeidah and Saleef — both key to supplying aid to a country with 17 million people in need of food assistance — could be closed.

The U.N.’s two-stage plan — which is supported by the Houthis in the north, who control the area where the Safer is, and the Saudi-backed government in the south — involves calls for a $79.6 million emergency operation to transfer the oil to a secure vessel. The rest of the $144 million budget covers the cost of establishing a permanent replacement solution for the Safer.

And as for the emergency operation? “Well, we're just waiting for money,” Gressly said.

Pledges so far include $10 million from Saudi Arabia, $8.4 million from Germany, $3 million from the European Union, $2 million from Qatar, and $1 million from France, with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announcing last month that President Joe Biden’s administration is “working with Congress” to provide $10 million. No money has been pledged yet from the likes of Canada, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, or Korea.

A crowdfunding campaign aiming to hit $5 million has so far raised more than $120,000.

Despite the stakes and international media attention, however, finding public and private donors willing to invest in prevention rather than a disaster response is proving difficult.

This conversation with Gressley has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the current situation?

The vessel could explode because the systems that provide inert gas into the chambers containing oil no longer function. So we have atmospheric oxygen in those chambers, and they could ignite. There are vapors … and they could accumulate to a level that a spark or something could ignite it and can cause an explosion.

Or the structure just gives way over time. I've seen different scenarios of how that could happen. The engine room could start to get flooded, it alters the balance of the ship, and then the stresses break at some point and it spills its cargo into the sea.

[The spill] has the potential of hitting any country in the Red Sea. It would depend on the seasonal currents, but all of them are at risk because we don't know what season it will break. It would certainly affect, in all cases, the Yemeni coast. It could likely affect the Saudi coast; quite easily across the Red Sea to the African coast; it would affect shipping wherever it is. And if it moves south towards the exit into the Indian Ocean area it could provide a choke point for shipping as well, which would be a major problem in its own right.

Have you identified the right company for the job?

Yeah. SMIT out of the Netherlands. They installed the vessel to start with. They know the vessel. They’ve been working on it in that area for a long time.

And what's happening now?

Well, we're just waiting for money.

$80 million?

Yeah, we got $60 million.

It just seems odd that it's still even an issue.

It’s my discovery in all of this that finding money for prevention is much harder than finding money for a response because most budgets are not structured for that. And many countries who are interested, including those who have made pledges, have struggled to find ways to actually identify funding for it: “Is it humanitarian? Is it environmental? Should we look at the defense budget? Where do we find this money?”

I guess the deadline is, say, yesterday, in terms of the urgency.

I briefed the European Union member states [on June 24]. I said, “I won't give up on this until the ship gives up.” We'll keep going until we get the money to do it. Unless the ship falls apart first. It could fall apart tomorrow.

How do you explain the lack of funding?

There's enough money in almost any country that we are getting funding from to do the whole thing. And I think it's two or three things:

Prevention is much harder to get funding for. Secondly, “can’t somebody else do it” is a common point. We haven't got money from the World Bank, either. We've tried that — “Well, we don't do this kind of thing.”

And my point to everybody is “Look, careful, I can tell you what the costs will be, what the impact will be. But one other impact is that all your development money or other money that you're hoping to spend on all your projects will also be at risk.” Because when the spill happens, everybody will find money to fight the spill. They’re going to take [funding] en masse from you to do that.

Do you view the current truce in Yemen as a window?

All of this planning was approved before the truce. But the truce is very beneficial to us. So even if the truce does not get extended, I think we can still do it.

Is the oil in there actually usable?

We don't know for sure but probably. It's probably evaporated over the years, and so it's probably not quite as good quality as it was originally, but still refinable. So the value would depend on the current quality of it.

And who would get it?

That's a question we've put to the side.

The problem is the ownership and control are now two different things. The control is under Sanaa, the ownership is in Aden or internationally. And therefore, until we can find a way to bring the two back together, in some negotiated fashion, we're not going to advance very far on the issue of the oil, or what to do with it. So in the interest of time and securing the oil so it doesn't spill out, acknowledge that that problem needs to be resolved but it doesn't need to be resolved first.

So we'll just leave it in a vessel there. Because that buys us plenty of time to do a proper negotiation and agreement on what to do with the oil and the proceeds.