Libya\u2019s National Oil Corporation (NOC) said on March 21 that it had contracted a specialist company to handle a damaged Russian tanker carrying LNG that is drifting towards the Libyan coast.<\/p>\n
The Arctic Metagaz would be towed to a Libyan port, NOC said in a statement, adding that the country\u2019s oil facilities were not at risk of pollution.<\/p>\n
Italy, France, Spain and six other southern EU members wrote to the European Commission last week warning the tanker posed \u201can imminent and serious risk of a major ecological disaster\u201d.<\/p>\n
Libya\u2019s NOC said the environmental threat \u201ccan be controlled to a very large extent\u201d and that an emergency room had been set up to coordinate operations with the relevant authorities.<\/p>\n
The vessel, carrying LNG from the Arctic port of Murmansk, has been unmanned since early March, when Russia\u2019s Transport Ministry said it was hit by Ukrainian naval drones. Initial reports said the vessel had sunk in the Mediterranean, but that proved not to be the case.<\/p>\n
In recent days, it had been left out of control after suffering damage off Libya\u2019s coast in recent days and was moving gradually towards the shore as a result of wind and waves, said NOC, adding that the emergency contract was arranged through Mellitah Oil and Gas in cooperation with Italy\u2019s Eni.<\/p>\n
An Italian official said on March 20 that the tanker is estimated to be carrying 450 metric tons of heavy oil and 250 tons of diesel as fuel supplies, and an \u201cuncertain\u201d quantity of LNG, which may have partly regasified and dispersed.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":29407,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-29506","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The Arctic Metagaz would be towed to a Libyan port.","published_date":"","news_description":"The Arctic Metagaz would be towed to a Libyan port.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/29506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/29506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29507,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/29506\/revisions\/29507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=29506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}