FSO Safer: A brief overview

A UN crowdfunding campaign to save a rotting Yemeni oil tanker amidst a war.

© Holm Akhdar

So what is the FSO Safer?

It is an old, rotting oil tanker off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea, originally converted into use as a storage vessel for oil, to later be offloaded onto other oil tankers for transport.

(FSO stands for Floating Storage and Offloading. ‘Safer’ is actually pronounced ‘Saffer’.)

On board is a little over a million barrels of light crude oil. Mainly due to the war in Yemen, it has not been adequately maintained for years and will never be useable again.

It is extremely vulnerable to the elements and a small incident could see it fall apart, along with those million barrels of oil. Not being able to maintain the right mix of gases in the storage area could see the whole thing blow up.

Sea conditions are looking to get rougher from October to December 2022, so time seems to be of essence for a vessel, which many are surprised to still see afloat. There is also a formal temporary truce in place amongst the warring sides, so the timing is delicate.

This seems a little crazy. Why has this not been resolved yet?

The main stumbling block over the last few years looks to have been the war in Yemen and the reluctance of the Houthis – who control the F.S.O. Safer - to even get UN inspectors on board to determine the extent of the problem. That seems to have been resolved recently – as long as they get to monetise the barrels on board. All this amidst a horrific war.

The UN has a two-step plan in place and contractors lined up to do the work – offload onto a temporary vessel to remove the short-term risk and then complete the transfer onto a proper oil tanker - but seems to be short of cash after recent funding requests with various governments.

So the United Nations is resorting to crowdfunding to get this operation started?

Looks like it. The cost of the overall plan is $144 million.

Phase 1, including getting the oil off the Safer onto a temporary storage facility – a five-month operation - is $60 million.

Phase 2, involving securing a permanent oil tanker – within a target of 18 months - is the remaining $84 million.

To address Phase 1, the UN held a pledging round in May 2022, and got close to $40 million from the international community and, with some top up pledges, received an additional $20 million to get to $60 million. To narrow some of the gap, the UN announced in June 2022 a crowdfunding campaign to raise $5 million from the public:

https://fundraise.unfoundation.org/give/412602/#!/donation/checkout

Seems crazy that it is has come to this, but the chequebooks are not coming out for this particular cause in comparison to other crises going on in the world.

Why have I not heard much about it?

Well, it has been in the news over the past few years. There have been calls for action from sources as diverse as Bloomberg to Greenpeace.

It’s been covered by the New Yorker twice, The Guardian, Time, Foreign Policy, and many others.

What would happen if it did sink?

It would not be the biggest oil spill ever but, considering its location off the coast of Yemen, there is the impact to the lives of those who use the ocean fishing, the local environment, shipping lanes (remember the impact of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal), it would be devastating and the cost of cleaning it up would be in the billions of dollars.

The Yemen government has compared it to the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker that ran aground in Alaska back in 1989. That disaster, which killed a lot of wildlife, polluted hundreds of miles of coastline and still has lingering negative effects, took years of work to mop up the oil and only had a quarter of the barrels on board as the F.S.O Safer.

So will it sink? Will they raise the money? Will the Houthis continue to co-operate?

Let’s find out. I will be tracking the story; the fundraising, oil transfer operations, the politics, the war in Yemen and any other aspects of this, frankly, crazy situation.

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