The Sounion suezmax, the ship that risks becoming the worst tanker spill this century, remains on fire and may be leaking oil, according to the US Department of Defense.
The ship was attacked multiple times by the Houthis in international waters between Yemen and Eritrea last Wednesday. The ship, owned by Greece’s Delta Tankers, has been on fire since August 23 with the Houthis releasing a dramatic video of the moment they set it ablaze.
A seafarer who passed by the ship at 12 nautical miles range told Splash today that all he was able to see through binoculars was just half the ship, the aft having sunk, and “flames with dense smoke” on the deck. Satellite images taken two days ago obtained by Splash show a heavily charred deck.
On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington DC said two tugs had been sent to salvage the stricken vessel but the Houthis had threatened to attack them as well.
The EU naval force in the region warned on Monday the stricken ship is both a navigational and an “imminent” environmental hazard.
The Sounion is carrying 150,000 tons of crude oil from Iraq. The badly damaged ship risks spilling four times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, arguably tanker shipping’s most famous casualty, potentially becoming the fifth worst oil spill of all time, according to statistics carried by the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF).
The ship is carrying a similar amount of oil to the FSO Safer and is in a similar location to that vessel, leading shipping consultant Lars Jensen to highlight today the potential environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Red Sea.
Splash has repeatedly reported on the United Nations’s operation to remove the FSO Safer from Yemeni waters. Last year, the UN bought a Euronav tanker and was able to empty the rusting, abandoned FSO Safer’s cargo of 1.14m barrels of crude oil.
Carrying over 1.1m barrels of oil, the FSO Safer was abandoned off Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hudaydah after the civil war broke out in the country in 2015. Since then, the vessel deteriorated significantly in the absence of any servicing or maintenance, prompting fears of a major environmental disaster
To fund the FSO Safer operation the UN issued a report outlining the consequences if the FSO Safer situation was not resolved.
“Now that study can be seen as a reasonable proxy for the consequences of a major spill from the Sounion given that both the geographic location and the amount of oil involved is almost the same,” Jensen, who heads up Vespucci Maritime in Copenhagen, wrote in a LinkedIn post today.
According to the UN report, the FSO Safer oil spill impact would have devastated the fishing communities on Yemen’s Red Sea coast where 500,000 people make their living from the fishing industry with 1.7m dependents.
Desalination plants on the Red Sea coast could be closed, cutting off water supply for millions, the UN report warned, adding that oil could reach the shores of Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia.
The UN estimated the clean-up bill from a possible FSO Safer disaster could have reached $20bn, just $1bn shy of the annual GDP of Yemen.
“It does raise the question as to whether or not it is ethically prudent to operate major oil tankers through the area under the current circumstances,” Jensen mused.
Pictured below from the UN report on the FSO Safer, whose precarious circumstances were very similar to the Sounion’s, are maps showing the areas at risk by using colours to indicate how much oil is expected on the surface in different places and times. Ports are marked with black dots, and water treatment plants are marked with blue dots.
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