The oil catastrophe averted by crowdfunding

When civil war broke out in 2014, a leaky tanker in the Red Sea became a crisis point-prompting a remarkable UN-led international public rescue effort

- EMMA BRYCE 

Since 1988, the hulking form of the FSO Safer has floated in the Red Sea, receiving crude oil from the bountiful Marib oilfields of Yemen. For 30 years, the ship was a critical piece of infrastructure in Yemen's booming oil industry, which at one time generated 63% of government revenue.

But the civil war broke out in 2014, and most of the Safer's crew were forced to abandon ship, leaving behind its cargo: 1.1m barrels of oil. Against mounting costs and security risks, maintaining the vessel became near impossible.

When leaks in the engine room in 2020 threatened to sink the ship, it stoked fears of what would happen if the cargo - four times more oil than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989 - plunged into the ocean. So, the UN, faced with a "ticking timebomb" and desperate to prevent an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, turned to an unprecedented source: crowdfunding.

The remarkable story came to its conclusion last month when salvage teams completed a multimillion-dollar operation to remove the oil from the Safer, thereby dodging a disaster that could have been "the worst spill of our era". But it was not destined to end happily, and in fact hung precariously on a rare thread of agreement between two warring parties in Yemen.

“I would describe it [Safer] as a monster,” said David Gressly, the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator for Yemen , who, with governments, NGOs and Yemeni businesses, spearheaded the rescue. “They don’t make them like this anymore.”

Built as a supertanker in 1976, the Safer was later converted into a floating storage and offloading platform (FSO), a vessel that stores crude oil in huge cargo tanks to be offloaded by passing ships. The vessel is owned by the Safer Exploration and Production Operations Company, Yemen’s first national oil and gas company.