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The F.S.O. Safer could spill a million barrels of crude at any moment
- silexia 5y agoQuestion: has there been any decent and uncorrupt Arab government? Everyone criticizes Western "imperialism", but it seems the lives of most people in the Middle East were much better when under British rule?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DisjointedHunt 5y agoIn this weeks episode of Mythbusters . . . .
- jimbob45 5y ago> The Houthi leadership has obstructed efforts by foreign entities to inspect the ship or to siphon its oil For anyone else whose mind jumped to the same conclusion as mine.
- userbinator 5y agoThey don't want others stealing their oil, but they're likely to lose it too if they don't transfer it somewhere safer (no pun intended), so it's definitely a strange situation with tons of politics involved.
- midasuni 5y agoIt’s also a bargaining chip. They can scuttle the ship and close suez for months, costing billions and killing hundreds of thousands.
- gtirloni 5y agoThat'd be all out war. I'm not sure they are that insane.
- colinmhayes 5y agoThey are in an all out war. Yemen is a war zone on par with where Syria was during the Obama regime.
- Aeolun 5y agoIt’s like a nuclear bomb. Quite powerful even if you can never use it.
- jimbob45 5y agoThat's a fast-tracked one-way ticket to being blown off of the planet by the united force of every world superpower. You really don't want the Americans and the Russians to ever agree that your atoms don't deserve to be bonded together anymore.
- midasuni 5y agoIt’s literally mentioned in the article
- tdeck 5y agoIt would probably be best just to buy it off them. Sure it's money going to a possible despotic regime (I am pretty ignorant about the sides in this conflict), but that happens all the time with "development" grants and the like.
- dlsa 5y agoOr contaminate the tanks with something that breaks it down the crude so its at least less harmful when it spills.
- Jiro 5y agoOr bomb them. (Not the ship, them.) Because when a group who rules an area is doing something that, when continued, is going to cause you serious harm and diplomatic measures have failed, that's called an act of war (or the equivalent for non-state actors). If someone is committing acts of war against you, you go to war with them (and somehow I don't think this particular war will result in lots of US casualties). This is what war is for.
- bambax 5y agoYou don't think they have been bombed enough? Did it work? Maybe the US learned something from the recent wars they waged and, with admirable consistency, lost.
- Jiro 5y agoThe biggest thing the US should learn from recent wars is "do what you went there to do, then leave and don't try to engage in any nation building". And they're still around, so no, they haven't been bombed enough. Dead people don't hold ships hostage.
- simiones 5y agoYou may want to read some news about the area - they are already being bombed. That is what started this whole issue in the first place, it's not likely to help end it. By and large, people who you are actively bombing are way less likely to listen to what you are shouting over the bombs.
- fspeech 5y agoExplosion would require a degree of air fuel mixture so that the reaction can go quickly. The vapor from evaporation of the oil could explode but not a million barrels of oil itself. So the number may have been used to conjure up a misleading picture if the intention is to emphasize the magnitude of a possible explosion. That being said, oil spill and uncontrolable fire are all very real risks, just not as exciting as explosions.
- DrBazza 5y agoCan (presuambly) crude oil "explode" if it's not mixed with air? It's been many years since I did chemistry but I have a vague recollection about "rapid exothermic" reactions requiring certain conditions, and crude oil in its thick gloopy liquid state definitely doesn't have that no matter how much oxygen you throw at it. It will just burn.
- fergie 5y ago"Before inerting became a commonplace safety measure, in the nineteen-seventies, tankers blew up surprisingly often, and with lethal consequences: in December, 1969, three of them exploded within seventeen days, killing four men"
- yread 5y agoInteresting, I had no idea. The tabloids can now run "10 resons why millennials think their tankers cannot explode"
- mlindner 5y agoHe didn't say they couldn't explode, he said the fuel itself can't explode, because there's not enough air and it's not vaporized. Liquids can't burn in air, only gasses can. (Technically it's possible to make a liquid oxidizer and evenly mix it into the fuel, in which case it should be able to burn, but that's not something that can happen normally as there are very few room temperature liquid oxidizers. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylaluminium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylaluminium ))
- sandworm101 5y agoHas not been a supertanker since 1987. Since then it has been only a floating oil storage tank, without engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer
- foobar1962 5y agoThat’s worse: empty tanks contain air and oil vapours which CAN explode.
- BHSPitMonkey 5y agoAnd you still haven't notified them?!
- sandworm101 5y agoStorage tanks at this scale are more than inert vessels. They would have accommodated that during the conversion process.
- robbiet480 5y agoI’m still reading it but with every paragraph it gets worse and worse and worse. How did this go unnoticed and unreported for so long? EDIT: I’ve finished it (long article). All I can take away from that is that the current situation and short and long term outlooks are all extremely bleak.
- colinmhayes 5y agoThe Yemeni civil war has been going on for like a decade. It's been reported on plenty. The situation with the boat has been reported on plenty too, although people were pretty tired of hearing about the war in Yemen by the time is became a known issue.
- agent327 5y agoBecause there's a civil war in that country, indirectly supported by the US through its Saudi Arabia proxy. It's a nasty, dirty conflict full of human rights violations, and reporting on it would bring to the public's attention many occasions in which the US and its proxy weren't exactly being paragons of virtue. So it's just not reported on instead.
- mlindner 5y agoIt's disingenuous to say it is supported by the US. If the US is "supporting it", so is France, UK, Italy, and Spain.
- pjc50 5y agoYes, and?
- 1cvmask 5y agoObama started the conflagration in Yemen. He overthrew their leader of over 20 years. He then bombed Yemen to the stone ages. In addition he armed the Saudi and other proxies with weapons to wreak havoc and genocide in Yemen. The Yemen story is like Obama’s grim reaper legacy in Libya (he even help create slave markets there), Sudan, Somalia, Africa and elsewhere. The overthrow of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh by Obama which was the first step to destroy Yemen: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/world/middleeast/04yemen.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/world/middleeast/04yemen....
- lordnacho 5y agoA quick search suggests that the world uses close to 100M barrels a day, of which the largest user, the US, uses about 20M. So this ship stores an amount that fuels about 1% of the world for a day. How many such ships are there, and how many are in as bad a state as this one?
- Cthulhu_ 5y agohttps://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker-fleet-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/468405/global-oil-tanker... has you covered; over 2000. I do think oil tankers are less than ideal and that "they" prefer direct oil pipelines from oil fields to refineries.
- Aeolun 5y ago100M barrels?! Where do we even get that stuff? I know the earth is large, but… That’s a 1km x 1km x 1km cube of oil every 60 days.
- lostlogin 5y agoThat doesn’t seem sustainable… And when you factor in coal usage, it is t going to be pretty.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoKaboom...
- baybal2 5y ago300 Kilotons of oil per supertanker 42 Terajoules per kiloton of oil * 300 = 12.6 Petajoules 12.6 Petajoules = 3 Megatons of TNT
- f1refly 5y agoExcept it doesnt work like that at all. Oil does not explode like that. The oil vapours which float on top of the oil and mix with oxygen can explode, but thats just a teeny tiny portion of the ships volume. It could crack open however, which is arguably much worse.
- Aeolun 5y agoHmm, so the explosion is not larger than a small hydrogen bomb even if it can combust all the fuel with 100% efficiency, which will never happen. Seems unlikely that an explosion is the largest worry.
- simiones 5y agoYes, but one of the awesome properties of oil, that have made it such a great fuel, is that you can't normally get all that energy out of it in one huge burst. One of the reasons is that the majority of that energy is not stored in the oil itself in some sense, it is stored in Oxygen in the air. There was recently a chemistry paper on this subject that contained exact numbers, but I haven't been able to find it again. Basically oil alone is not a great source of energy, oil+oxygen is; and it's very hard to get a mix of oxygen and thick crude oil.
- OneTimePetes 5y agoOkay, positive attitude: We congeal the oil in situ in the tanks into plastic-blocks. It renders the ship unuseable but the ship is already unusable, but it at least reduces the hazard on final breaking apart. PS: I lost my bet, i had a bet, that 5 months after we are out of Afghanistan, the warmongering would start again. Damn it. We embargoe a regime, its infrastructure is falling into disrepair, and now that disrepair is a reason to go in? Whats next? Pothole repair jobs with bunker-busters in Iran? Infrastructure demolishion and rebuilding as a service via the Military Industrial Complex? A construction company called the MOAB-mob? If the saudis mercenaries cant win and they don't get the genocide properly done, at least pay for better bad journalism to draw the US into another firefight/fist-aid mission.
- pjc50 5y ago> the warmongering would start again It never stopped? The war in Yemen has been going for years, and the China hawks seem to have survived the change in US government just fine.
- mlindner 5y agoLooks like a fear mongering article to me with little information of substance. How is it going to create the fire triangle when it's been stable for years? What's the ignition source? Also the location isn't exactly full of biological diversity. There is almost no vegetation anywhere along the coastline where it is moored, were the worst to happen.
- chefkoch 5y agoso nothing to see, please keep walking?
- dustintrex 5y agoI've dived on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia, not too far from where the tanker in question is anchored, and I've rarely seen a similar density of fish or coral. https://www.visitsaudi.com/en/do/adventure-activities/4-top-scuba-sites-near-jeddah https://www.visitsaudi.com/en/do/adventure-activities/4-top-...
- mynameismon 5y agoIn addition, it is also important to remember that the ship is itself rusting due to a lack of maintenance, and it is only a matter of time before the oil enters the sea.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 5y agoSomeone deleted their comment with the google maps link, but it's conveniently located next to the "Yemen Company For Flour Mills And Silos" aka "big pile of explosive and flammable powders that's a critical food source for the region". https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yemen+Company+For+Flour+Mills+And+Silos-alHudaydah/@14.8406812,42.9407426,4334m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x16053be363aba37b:0x7aea559347f1b8a2!2sAl+Hudaydah,+Yemen!3b1!8m2!3d14.7909118!4d42.9708838!3m4!1s0x16053d92d191409b:0xb1de3a55a4c0e983!8m2!3d14.8371389!4d42.9526591 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Yemen+Company+For+Flour+Mi... I'm also reminded of the SS Richard Montgomery, which is another "if we leave this for a generation maybe it will go away" situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
- MertsA 5y agoThere's no chance the ship poses a risk of burning those grain silos. If it explodes, it won't go up like the port of Beirut, it'll just kill people on the ship and quite possibly spill large quantities of oil into the sea. The risk to the flour mill is shipping through that port would be stopped for quite some time and if there was a large burning oil slick the surrounding area could be evacuated.
- shakaijin 5y ago> You must give consent to targeting tracking to see this content. No thank you.
- Etheryte 5y agohttps://archive.ph/tyf5W https://archive.ph/tyf5W Personally I've simply set up archive.today as a custom search engine in my browser exactly for situations like this. Take the original URL, chuck it in the archiver and read away.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThanks for mentioning this, it made he check if there was a duckduckgo bang for this and yep, !ais URL works.
- ogogmad 5y agoReader Mode in Firefox gets around the problem. What's the equivalent for Brave/Chrome?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nokeya 5y agoIf they have no diesel for generators, what about solar panels? Even the old used ones. They have enough of sun
- piokoch 5y agoReally clicks are so important these days? This article proves nothing except that dangerous catastrophe can happen. People don't even realize how potentially dangerous is gasoline station a few blocks away or fertilizers magazine just outside their town or department of chemistry on the nearby University. For some reason those dangers are not (yet) that sexy to be described in the alarmistic article.
- robbiet480 5y agoNone of those examples you listed have as wide ranging consequences as this ship blowing up, sinking or leaking. Any of those events would have severe consequences for the region and, to a lesser extent, the entire world, as the article lays out pretty clearly (starting at “The Safer threatens not only the ecosystems of the Red Sea but also the lives of millions of people.”)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ur-whale 5y agohttps://archive.vn/tyf5W https://archive.vn/tyf5W
- Lebrun 5y agoThank you for the explanation. It is clear for me.. https://www.rapidfs.run/ https://www.rapidfs.run/
- bell-cot 5y agoVery misleading title on the submission. The New Yorker's title is no better, but their subtitle is half-decent: "Stranded in Yemen’s war zone, a decaying supertanker has more than a million barrels of oil aboard. If—or when—it explodes or sinks, thousands may die." Summary - The unmaintained, rusting tanker is at the entrance to the Red Sea (and thus the Suez Canal). The side in the Yemeni civil war which controls it is enjoying considerable benefits from the ongoing threat of a huge oil spill. Diplomatic efforts at a resolution have gone nowhere. Note - In the context (derelict tanker, crude oil), the term "explode" refers only to the explosion of some flammable vapors at the top of the oil tanks. That would (very likely) still be enough to start breaking up the ship, thus spilling ~all the crude oil.
- JoachimS 5y agoThis ship is unfortunately not alone in the world. Here is another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Nabarima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Nabarima
- ajuc 5y agoThis kind of things is what I think of when people complain about "hidden external costs of electric cars". Yes, recycling batteries is an issue. Conditions in rare earth mines are an issue. But when you want to "consider hidden costs" of EVs you should do the same for ICE cars. And there are lots of these, including building, maintaining and recycling supertankers, refineries, pipelines, oil wells on land and in the sea, causing oil spill every decade, keeping oil tyrannies in charge, fueling resource wars in 3rd world countries. But it's status quo so it doesn't count.
- 10xrubberduck 5y agoIt's crude oil, so this topic is a bit of a tanget. EVs will reduce consumption, but not make it zero.
- worrycue 5y agoAren’t most power grids still powered mostly by fossil fuels. You have to pay for the fuel one way or another - i.e. if it’s not gasoline, it’s coal or natural gas; unless you charge only at peak solar/wind power generation and there is excess power generated, your charging will increase fossil fuel usage.
- ajuc 5y agoICE have <30% efficiency. Usually about 20%. Turbines in powerplants have about 50% efficiency. Best ones up to 60%. Even if you get all your energy from fossil fuels it's better to burn them in powerplants than in small inefficient ICEs in cars that most of the time aren't even working in optimal conditions and start/stop constantly.
- worrycue 5y agoI suppose my point is you are still burning fossil fuels - admittedly less of it - in most cases (for now) so you pay into the shipping of that stuff around too.
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- tomohawk 5y agoAll Iran has to do is make it known that they want this fixed. They control that area. The IRGC must not want it fixed.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoAmericans should worry less about oil tankers and more about their ageing and decrepit pipeline infrastructure.