The failure of the Britain-Netherlands conference.. UN official: We hope that Safer oil will be unloaded at the end of May
English - Saturday 06 May 2023 الساعة 10:34 am
Mukalla, NewsYemen:
United Nations Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq said that he hopes that the process of unloading the stored oil from the Safer tanker anchored off the coast of Yemen will begin by the end of this May.
The UN official's statements came just days after the failure of the Britain-Netherlands conference, which was organized on Thursday 4/5/2023, in order to collect the remaining funds for the success of unloading 1.1 million barrels of oil inside the dilapidated Safer tanker tanks and avoiding a serious environmental disaster threatening the world.
The United Nations pinned great hopes on the success of the recent conference in order to bridge the remaining funding gap in order to avert catastrophe and a serious oil spill into the Red Sea. However, the conference was only able to collect about $8 million out of the $29 million that the United Nations needs to complete its plan to unload Safer oil to the tanker "Nutica", which the international organization bought from China last March for $55 million.
The United Nations put an amount of $129 million in order to avoid the crisis of the Safer tanker in Yemen, but it found it difficult to collect this amount until the moment, which threatens the success of the unloading process that will take place soon after the new tanker sailed from China towards Yemen last April. According to the statements of officials of the international organization.
"We have internal financial mechanisms available if there are still gaps. This (funding) of course needs to be compensated by donors," the deputy UN spokesman added. He explained that cleaning up an oil spill could cost $20 million.
To date, the international organization has raised nearly $108 million from governments, private donors, private individuals and companies. It hopes to collect $11 million urgently before the start of the scheduled unloading process, according to the plan, at the end of this May.
United Nations officials have been warning for years that the Red Sea and the Yemeni coast are in danger because oil may leak from the Safer tanker, in quantities that may reach four times those that leaked in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in 1989 off Alaska.
Because of the absurd war led by the Houthi militia, Iran's arm in Yemen, maintenance operations were carried out on the Safer tanker in 2015. The United Nations warned that the safety of the tanker's structure was deteriorating greatly and that it was at risk of exploding at any moment.
