Cable Incidents 'Exceptional' in Frequency, says Finnish Secret Service
service chief said.The Baltic Sea region is on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the NATO military alliance has boosted its presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.On Sunday, Finland released the oil tanker Eagle S, which is suspected of breaking a Baltic Sea power cable and four data cables late last year, but Finnish police have yet to provide conclusions in several ongoing investigations.Juha Martelius, the head of Finland's security and intelligence service Supo called the cable incidents
Subsea Sabotage in the Baltic Sea - a Timeline for Perspective
A Finnish court today denied a request for the release of an oil tanker suspected by police of damaging an undersea power line and four telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea last week. The incident was one of several since 2022 in which underwater critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea has suffered suspicious damage. Baltic Sea nations are on high alert and NATO has said it will boost its presence in the Baltic Sea.The following is a timeline of major 'incidents' since September 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.SEPT 2022: NORD STREAM BLASTSNord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2
Israel Says It Tracked Down the Ship Linked to Recent Oil Spill
Israel accused Iran on Wednesday of being linked to a recent oil spill off its shores that caused major ecological damage, calling the incident environmental terrorism.The spill was caused by an oil tanker that was carrying pirated cargo from Iran to Syria last month, Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel said.The vessel sailed through the Gulf and the Red Sea without radio contact, switching its tracking devices back on before passing through Egypt's Suez Canal, Gamliel told reporters.It turned the devices off again before entering Israeli waters in the eastern Mediterranean
Salvors Lift Norwegian Frigate
Salvors used a unique lift method that combined two heavy lift vessels and four cranes to raise a Norwegian frigate that had become partially submerged following a collision with an oil tanker off the coast of Norway in November.On November 8, 2018, Norwegian heavy frigate KNM Helge Ingstad collided with the tanker Sola TS near Bergen, and sank on the inclined slope of a fjord. The accident injured eight people and caused the temporary closure of the Sture Oil Terminal near Bergen and the nearby Kollsness gas-and-condensate terminal, as well as several offshore fields.
Oil Removed from WWII Era Shipwreck
to support the planned operation. The load-out included "hot tap" oil extraction systems, submersible pumping systems, oil spill response resources, tank close-out and patching supplies, and other innovative diver tools. A market search was conducted to identify and charter a commercial oil tanker to collect the recovered petroleum product transport it for disposal or recycling at the conclusion of the operation. The oil tanker vessel Humber was selected.(U.S. Navy photo by LeighAhn Ferrari)Humber, along with Military Sealift Command's (MSC) USNS Salvor were positioned directly above
Exxon Starts Drilling at Offshore Guyana Projects
, said, “We are well on our way to producing oil less than five years after our first discovery, which is well ahead of the industry average for similar projects.”The company said it expects to start producing oil from these developments in 2020.The projects include the conversion of an oil tanker into a floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel named Liza Destiny, which would have a production capacity of 120,000 barrels of oil per day, along with four undersea drill centers with 17 production wells. Construction of the FPSO and subsea equipment is underway in more than
Sanchi Oil Spill Puts Coral Reefs at Risk
and raising concerns about damage to the marine ecosystem. Multiple oil slicks were reported to have come from the ship, which was caring nearly 1 million barrels of condensate, and there are fears that the ship may be leaking heavy fuel oil. Now scientists say water polluted by the Sanchi oil tanker may reach coral reefs in the Ryukyu Island chain, based on the latest ocean model simulation by researchers from the National Oceanography Center (NOC) and the University of Southampton, using the leading edge, high-resolution global ocean circulation model, NEMO. These latest predictions
China Plans First Lab on Ocean Oil Spill Cleaning
will go to research projects on oceanic ecological protection and safety issues for sea-borne transportation. To date, only the United States and France have laboratories capable of undertaking tests and inspections required in treating ocean oil spills, the report said. The Iranian oil tanker Sanchi collided with a dry cargo vessel early this month about 160 nautical miles off China's east coast, in the world's worst oil tanker disaster for decades. ($1 = 6.3268 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Chen Aizhu; Editing by Alison Williams
Did Dispersants Help Responders Breathe Easier at Deepwater Horizon?
damages, scientists were not allowed the time to design and implement robust experiments to measure the impacts of the dispersant injection. The dispersant, Corexit EC9500A, roughly resembles a mix of mineral oil, windshield-wiper fluid, and household dish detergent. During a typical oil tanker accident, this dispersant fluid might be applied to the sea surface to cause oil slicks to break up into smaller droplets that dissipate into waters of the open sea, so that less oil reaches ecologically sensitive coastlines. But what was the effect of injecting this dispersant into the bowels
February 2025
