Salvage operation underway as oil spill off Oman expands to 1,300 sq km

Two months after an explosion tore through the Caroline Bezengi in June, the tanker is still bleeding oil into the Arabian Sea. Now, finally, salvage crews are moving in to stabilize what may be the region's most intractable environmental crisis—a ship with no clear owner, no functioning insurance, and an expanding slick that has swallowed 1,300 square kilometers of ocean.

The vessel, believed to be part of Russia's shadow fleet ferrying sanctioned crude, first reported the blast near the Hallaniyat archipelago off Oman's central coast. For weeks, the leak went largely uncontained. By Thursday, when the risk management firm Ambrey announced that salvage operations had begun, oil was already washing onto Omani beaches. Greenpeace's satellite analysis told a grimmer story: the spill had exploded from 45 square kilometers in late July to roughly 1,300 by mid-August—a thirty-fold expansion in less than three weeks. Omani authorities themselves had estimated only 400 square kilometers just days earlier, suggesting the true scale remained uncertain even as it spiraled.

Ambrey, a UK-based firm now coordinating the response, said specialist teams had already boarded the Caroline Bezengi to begin stabilizing its cargo. Salvage vessels were en route. The operation involved aircraft, personnel, and equipment marshaled across an unnamed international coalition—though Ambrey declined to specify which countries or companies were participating beyond Oman itself and one unnamed "leading" oil spill response firm. The United Nations maritime authority said it was monitoring closely. The International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds, the bodies normally tasked with funding cleanup after tanker disasters, announced they would not be involved, having determined the incident likely resulted from an act of war and thus fell outside their mandate.

Ed Wollaston, Ambrey's director of global response, acknowledged the "extremely challenging situation." The annual Khareef monsoon was battering the region with adverse weather, complicating every aspect of the salvage effort. "We are working around the clock to mitigate the environmental impact," he said. The words carried the weight of a race against physics: each day the tanker leaked, more oil dispersed into currents and onto coastlines, including a marine reserve established only last year off the Hallaniyat islands.

Experts were blunt about what had been lost. Najmedin Meshkati, an oil spill specialist at the University of Southern California, said the two-month delay between the explosion and the salvage operation represented a catastrophic window of inaction. "Source control on day three is worth many multiples of source control on day 60," he told Al Jazeera. Containment in the first seventy-two hours could have prevented most of this. But Meshkati also recognized the bind Oman faced: the tanker was an orphan, its owner unresponsive, its flag state—it had cycled through Cameroon, Palau, and Liberia—functionally absent. No mid-sized maritime authority was equipped to handle such a vessel alone.

Hanen Keskes, Greenpeace's campaigns director for the Middle East and North Africa, framed the crisis as a failure of international coordination. "Given the scale of this—a damaged tanker in a remote location, during monsoon season, with no clear owner or verified insurer to compel a rapid response—this is a case where international assistance should be mobilised urgently," she said. The capabilities required to contain such a spill often exceeded what any single nation possessed. Every day of delay meant more oil dispersing beyond reach.

The legal architecture designed to handle such disasters was cracking under the weight of geopolitical complexity. Damilola Olawuyi, an energy and environmental law professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, pointed out that the "polluter pays" principle—long a cornerstone of international maritime law—had become nearly impossible to enforce when the polluter's identity was obscured by shell companies, flag-hopping, and sanctions evasion. In an era of shadow fleets and geopolitical realignment, identifying who was responsible for cleanup had become as difficult as stopping the leak itself. The compensation regime that should have funded remediation was now invoking a war exclusion that might void it entirely. What remained was a slick spreading across 1,300 square kilometers, monsoon winds pushing it toward shore, and a salvage operation racing against time and weather to prevent it from becoming worse.