Transports of joy
* Go with the flow
* Become an oil baron
* Claim your petrol on expenses
* Wriggle out of polluter-pays fines
In this age of the Anthropocene, the destructive Era of Man, there is no more representative image than a seagull smothered in oil. Robbed of flight by the weight of tar, one can barely imagine what must be going through the bird’s tiny mind. The world’s economy relies on such a charming substance, with 81 billion barrels produced each day. Moving the stuff about is a fraught and lengthy business, full of opportunities for accidents. A tanker takes nearly forty-two days to travel from Saudi to Texas. The short hop from England to Holland takes two: it would be quicker swimming across with each barrel. Oil spills happen with wonderful regularity, but you need only pay attention to the biggies. They will help you to put the planet to bed. Whether you employ terrorism, the advancing decrepitude of freight transport or rely on Mother Nature herself, the massive oil slick belongs as much to the future as to the past. And, best of all, you’ll sail into the sunset scot free
Finally, just after 8 a.m. on 19th November 2002 the great hulk of the tanker Prestige juddered, then split in two. Even before she sank, the Atlantic was turning black as twenty million gallons of oil leached from her broken form. But that was just the start. For weeks, the Prestige dutifully bled 125 tonnes of oil every day. Environmentalists wept pathetically from the nearby Galician coastline as the dark tide engulfed 350 miles of its ecologically fragile shores. They had reason to cry. Knowing exactly how to maximize the effects of this toxic cargo, the tides had dragged the oil towards the treasured coral reefs of Galicia. Even without your intervention it would take years to clean; if you joined the efforts, it would be a never-ending chore.
In total, 64,000 tonnes of fuel oil joined the tide. The Prestige is not only a lesson in what is achievable when one of the rust-buckets of the tanker world sets sail weighed down with pollutants, but a motivational reminder that even the most high-profile environmental disasters can be executed with impunity. Six years on, and no one has been prosecuted for the lavish pollution caused by the Prestige. A detailed examination into the events that led to her falling apart off the coast of Spain confirms that it is very much possible to get away with anything behind the opaque mesh of shipping ownership, corruption, and lack of regulation. A broken trail of evidence means that no one really knows who owned the oil that washed up on Galicia.
Without further ado, you must concoct a repeat, using the Prestige disaster as a template for success. The ship was owned by a Liberian front company called Mare International. Their accident insurance on the vessel was £15 million, a mere hundredth of the clean-up costs of Spain’s Galician coast alone. Mare International appeared to be owned by a secretive Greek shipping dynasty, the Coulouthros family, which in turn operated under a company called Universe Maritime. But the Prestige sank with the flag of the Bahamas flying from its decks after it was registered with the Bahamas Maritime Authority, an organization that may conjure images of palm trees and all things tropical, but in actual fact has its offices in the City of London. So far, so complicated. The sludge that belched from the Prestige was being moved across the planet by an oil trading company called Crown Resources which, although formed in Gibraltar, has its headquarters in Zurich, but also works from a major office in an exclusive address in London’s West End. At the time of the disaster, at least five of its directors were British.
Back in the summer of 2002, word reached ship broker Stefan Giesen, of the brokerage firm Petriam, that Crown Resources was on the look-out for a ship to shift some 70,000 tonnes of oil across the planet. He had found the ideal vessel. The Prestige had recently been given a clean bill of health by US shipping authorities. Crown would take it, hiring the Prestige for £13,000 a day. For Crown, which traded millions of tonnes of crude oil across the globe, it was just another anodyne deal. Nine days earlier, when the Prestige anchored outside Gibraltar to refuel, British authorities had not seen fit to inspect the single-hulled tanker.
Meanwhile, in Russia, news of the deal would have undoubtedly pleased one of the country’s most prolific entrepreneurs, Mikhail Fridman. This oilman had founded the Alfa Group Consortium, a powerful Russian conglomerate which happened to own, among a myriad of interests, Crown Resources. At the time of the catastrophe, Fridman was the ninth richest man aged under 40 in the world and worth more than a billion pounds. Now, aged 43, he has almost £7 billion in the bank and has deservedly nudged into the top fifty richest characters in the world. Among other companies listed within his consortium was Tyumen Oil (TNK), a relatively new oil business. Four months before the spill, the company had been investigated but officials found no grounds for concern. Even so, misgivings were voiced by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development over the deal that had led to TNK acquiring the massive Siberian Samotlor oil field.
Samotlor is an absolute gem. It is probably among your favourite places on the planet. Lakes of oil are regularly reported on the tundra surface. An independent study published a year before the Prestige sank revealed that up to 2 million acres of land there were polluted by oil. Rivers and underground aquifers were contaminated by up to fifty times the Russian safety standards, which are hardly the most stringent in the world. Samples of drinking water taken over five years showed that 97 per cent were poisoned with oil. One report estimates that pipelines in the region were leaking 500 litres of oil every second. Some of Britain’s biggest names in business pricked up their ears – such generous leakage rates meant a whole lot of oil was still to be had. Weeks before the Prestige sank, City grandees Sir Peter Walters and Sir William Purves joined Tyumen’s ‘supervisory board’. Purves is a former director of the Shell Transport and Trading Company. Sir Peter is a former chairman of BP, which had just proudly announced world-beating environmental credentials.
Less than a year after the Prestige sank, and with its toxic cargo still lapping the shores of Europe, BP merged with TNK in a £3.5 billion deal to operate in one of the most immaculately polluted and environmentally damaged oil-producing areas on the planet. Samotlor. In more ways than one it was a shrewd move. By 2007, TNK-BP was producing 1.8 million barrels of oil daily.
Soon enough, James Harmon wanted a slice of the action. Harmon joined the TNK advisory board, having left his position as chairman of the US Export-Import Bank of the United States. While he was chairman, the government agency had approved the loan of £250 million in credit to TNK for the refurbishment of the Samotlor oil field. It was so controversial that the White House had tried to block the deal. They were worried about the Alfa Group’s alleged Mafia connections. It mattered not. Houston-based energy company Halliburton wanted the deal to go ahead. And they were pretty well connected. Leading from the top was their chief executive. He was called Dick Cheney. So good was he that Halliburton was awarded £146 million for the refurbishment of the Samotlor field and Cheney went on to become the second most powerful figure in the world, the US vice-president.
The truth is that the oil which inked the southern and western coasts of Europe perhaps came from Samotlor, but no one really knows. Crown traded significantly with TNK Tyumen, importing up to £45 million of Russian crude oil into Western Europe each month, but there the trail ends. Possibly it came from Iraq. Six weeks before the Prestige slick, Alfa signed one of the largest deals in the corrupt United Nations oil-for-food programme, taking twenty million barrels a year from the Middle Eastern state.
Since the Prestige went down, oil and shipping industries have continued to steer clear of international controls and regulations. The search for a suspect has foundered. Attempts by Spain to prosecute US shipping bodies for having declared the Prestige effectively seaworthy have collapsed. And the plot gets murkier. It emerged that, shortly before it halved, the ship had been inspected and surveyed in St Petersburg, Dubai and also Guangzhou, China, where repairs were made to the part that subsequently broke.
Currently, the EU is attempting to force through a law on the ‘polluter pays’ principle, which would somewhat take the edge off trying for a repeat. But industry lobbying has forced through a clause which means the law will only apply to protected habitats, as well as numerous other exemptions. Subsequent negotiations have established the International Oil Spill Pollution Compensation (IOPC) Fund, made up largely from levies on oil companies, and which could pay up to £90 million compensation for damages, if the trails weren’t so hard to follow.
Meanwhile, more than four years on, the Prestige continues to do admirable work. New slicks have been detected, up to 23,000 tonnes of oil remain in the ship’s carcass, and bacteria corroding the hull could soon produce a rupture. Over the last forty years, major oil spills have occurred every two years. Some time soon, a shipping broker will say he has the perfect ship. Soon afterwards, a supertanker carrying 250,000 tonnes of oil will rupture. And you’ll be there, if required, to help them cover their tracks.
* Spanish government announces they know who is to blame for the Prestige disaster. Never.
* Massive supertanker accidentally beaches below the white cliffs of Dover. Channel turns black. Ship’s captain never heard of again. Imaginable.
* ‘Polluter pays’ legislation forced through, far stricter than currently proposed. For each drop of oil spilt, an immediate £100 fine. Not a chance.
* In 2017, the Prestige surrenders the remainder of her cargo. On the same day it emerges that a gigantic spill at the Samotlor field has been covered up for seven years. Possible.
* Terrorists sabotage a Shell oil tanker, polluting majority of Niger Delta. Shell refuses to pay clean-up costs, declaring legal action against alleged attackers. Extremely likely.
Likelihood of oil supertanker sinking and causing huge environmental disaster by 2015: 84%