General – Oil Removal
Boskalis has reached an agreement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for the oil removal from the FSO Safer moored off Yemen’s Red Sea coast.
This project is a part of the UN-coordinated operation to remove and transfer more than one million barrels of oil from a decaying tanker into a safe modern tanker and the responsible disposal of the Safer.
Peter Berdowski, CEO Boskalis: “We have been assisting the UN in their endeavors to avert a potential massive environmental and humanitarian disaster off the coast of Yemen since 2021. We are extremely delighted that these efforts and the perseverance of the UN to raise the necessary funds has brought us to this agreement. Following a long planning period, our salvage experts are keen to get to work and to remove the oil from the Safer. I would like to express my admiration and gratitude to the many UN member states supporting this operation including the Netherlands, which played a prominent role. The Boskalis vessel Ndeavor will depart tomorrow from the port of Rotterdam stocked with all the necessary salvage equipment and I wish the crew all the success in this important mission.”
The Safer is a Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO) facility moored off the Red Sea coast of Yemen. Constructed in 1976 as an oil tanker and converted in 1987 to be a floating storage facility, the Safer is single-hulled and is believed to contain an estimated 1.14 million barrels of light crude oil.
The FSO has not been maintained since 2015 because of the conflict in Yemen, and it has decayed to the point where there is a risk it could explode or break apart, which would have disastrous environmental and humanitarian effects on the region.
