The United Nations has announced the use of a tanker it bought to prevent an oil spill off the coast of the civil war country Yemen. The head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Achim Steiner, announced on Thursday in New York that his organization had signed a purchase agreement with the company Euronav for a large tanker that could hold more than one million barrels of oil.

Steiner spoke of a "major breakthrough" in efforts to prevent an environmental catastrophe caused by the oil tanker "FSO Safer", which has been anchored in front of a Yemeni port for years and is rotting. The UN mission will counter the "risk of an ecological and humanitarian disaster of massive proportions".

According to the UNDP chief, the supertanker is scheduled to leave for Yemen in April, after undergoing routine maintenance while still in China. If everything goes according to plan, the pumping of oil from the "FSO Safer" could begin at the beginning of May.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in Yemen in 2015, the "FSO Safer" has been anchored off the rebel-controlled port of Hodeida without being maintained. The 47-year-old ship stores 1.1 million barrels of crude oil (about 175 million liters). UN experts have expressed fears in the past that the ship could break apart. They estimated the costs of the resulting oil spill at the equivalent of 19 billion euros.

The amount of oil on the "FSO Safer" corresponds to four times the amount that was released into the sea in 1989 after the accident of the "Exxon Valdez" off the US state of Alaska. The resulting oil spill is still considered one of the most devastating environmental disasters in history.

The United Nations had been looking for years for a solution for the "FSO Safer". After unsuccessfully considering other options, they decided in an unusual step to buy a tanker themselves.