“It is simply a disaster waiting to happen.” Alexander Saverys, head of the shipping company CMB Tech, was talking about the tankers Russia uses to move sanctioned oil. He called them a “ticking time bomb.”
His warning follows a Financial Times report that more than half of Russia’s “shadow fleet” tankers are corroding and could cause a large-scale environmental disaster. The paper cited Anil Sharma, executive director of GMS Partnership, the world’s largest ship recycling company.
Ships kept running past their time
Sharma said a growing number of vessels are being run far beyond their normal service life. By rights, wear and corrosion should have sent them to the scrapyard already. “At least a third of such vessels need to be decommissioned, and possibly more,” he said. “Frankly, I believe we are talking about more than half of the fleet.”
Shipbroker Clarksons puts the fleet at about 1,800 vessels, roughly 1,500 of them oil or product tankers. Many are well over 20 years old, the age at which cargo ships are typically scrapped.
Why keep them sailing? Sharma pointed to the money. Owners of sanctioned vessels are stretching out the working life of their ships, he said, because oil prices have climbed on the crisis in the Persian Gulf and made the trade profitable.
No insurance, thin crews
Saverys described the ships as uninsured and poorly maintained, with low-quality crews on board. “It is a great miracle that no major accidents have occurred yet,” he said.
The Black Sea has already seen trouble. At the end of May, drones attacked three tankers of the Russian shadow fleet there, near Turkey.
Sources
- Russia's shadow fleet is massively corroding and threatens a large-scale environmental disaster – FT
