Finland fears Russian oil disaster

Take heart-wrenching pictures of Spanish beaches saturated with oil from a stricken tanker. Then imagine a similar catastrophe in an icy setting and add a history of suspicion between neighbours, and you'll be closer to understanding how Finns feel about Russian oil exports and Russians about Finnish demands to restrict them. This winter, with exceptionally thick ice in the Gulf of Finland, Finns have been nervously watching the oil tankers passing by their coastline and local papers have reported extensively on the movements of each vessel.
As the pace of exports from Russian and Baltic ports increases, so do the risks of a severe accident. Russia is eager to export as much oil as it can at a time when the price of crude has soared in anticipation of war in Iraq.

Finns feel Russia doesn't set strict enough safety standards for tankers entering its ports, but Russians suspect Finland is only promoting its own tanker and ice-breaking capacity. "We've been waiting with fear for an accident to happen. It doesn't feel good at all -- danger is closer every day," said Martti Eskola, who lives in the small seaside village of Emasalo, east of Helsinki.
"One can only hope sense will prevail. If our eastern neighbours are in such a terrible hurry to invest in oil exports, they should also update security arrangements," said Eskola. Throughout the winter, several tankers carrying crude oil from Russian and Estonian ports in the Gulf of Finland have been stranded in ice which in early March was around twice as thick as normal at 55 to 75 centimetres.

There have been some narrow escapes. A couple of tankers have run aground in the Danish straits and the latest incident happened on Feb. 24 when a Maltese-registered tanker carrying 27,000 tons of crude oil collided with a Gibraltar-flagged cargo vessel in the Gulf of Finland. No spills were reported. The waters around the Finnish and Swedish coasts can be frozen solid from October to April.
Nordic countries would like to see Russia adopt their jointice classification, but Russian officials issuing "ice passports" to vessels wanting to enter their waters in the winter said the country's own regulations are strict enough. "I don't see any problem in terms of reliability of these vessels. All necessary protective measures have been taken," said Loly Tsoi, head of ice-breaking technology at St Petersburg's Central Marine Research and Design Institute.

To add to Russian suspicions about Finnish motives, Finnish shipyards would probably benefit if Russia bows to Western pressure and orders more ice breakers. The state-dominated Finnish power group Fortum sells transport capacity to other companies and its oil tankers are frequent visitors to Russian ports such as Primorsk, making some Russians suspect that Finland is promoting its services.
And of course all Finnish political parties want to voice environmental concerns ahead of general elections on March 16. The volume of oil transported through the Baltic Sea has already surpassed that from the BlackSea through the Bosporus, rising to 68 mm tons last year from 40 mm two years earlier and 20 mm tons in 1995. That is expected to rise to more than 100,000 mm in a few years when construction of new terminals is completed.
The Primorsk port near the Finnish border started operating in 2001 and the first terminal at nearby Vysotsk is expected to become operational in November-December this year. Ironically, both ports are built on former Finnish soil, lost in World War Two.

From a Russian port in the Gulf of Finland, an oil tanker has to travel, with the aid of an ice breaker in the winter, several hundred miles to the open sea, and further south pass the tricky Danish straights before it reaches the ocean. If an ice breaker gets stuck, the vessel behind in the narrow ice-free channel cannot swerve to avoid collision.
"On the Baltic Sea we have been lucky. There have been less accidents than on average in the world," said Kalervo Jolma at the national Finnish Environment Institute. Environmentalistssay an oil spill here would be more harmful than many other places in the world because the climate means nature is slower to recover.
"In the worst case scenario we're basically talking about the collapse of an ecosystem," said Dima Litvinov, campaign director at the environmentalist group Greenpeace. "And even if an accident were not quite that devastating, there would be very dire consequences to marine life, certainly to tourism, and bird life," he said. "The Baltic is a very sensitive sea compared with the Atlantic."

The problem will not disappear when the ice melts because these waters are difficult to navigate even in the summer because they are shallow, with abundant reefs. Environmentalists recall that the tanker Prestige was on its way to Spain from Lithuania, passing through the Baltic Sea, before it hit an Atlantic storm and spilled 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil off the French and Spanish coasts in November.
In winter, oil is transported in double-hull tankers which are more sturdy thansingle-hull vessels. "I think the worst thing is that when the ice melts, the single-hull tankers come back. They only need to touch the ground and everything will spill out," said Eskola.

For people living on the Finnish, Swedish and Danish coasts, the EU's timetable for banning one-hull tankers, expected to come into force sometime around 2010, seems like a long wait. Spain, France and Portugal urged the European Union to impose a ban after the single-hull Prestige went down. But such a ban would not help the Baltic Sea, where most traffic sticks to international waters.
After unsuccessfully lobbying the Russian authorities to prevent the entry of oil tankers which they feel have insufficient bow protection, the four Nordic countries are considering seeking special protection for the Baltic. If they manage to convince the United Nations' International Maritime Organization to declare the Baltic a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA), they could impose much stricter regional restrictions on shipping.

With a PSSA rating -- protecting areas such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef -- the Nordic countries could even impose restrictions on vessels passing through international waters. Until then, the people on the coasts of the Baltic Sea will just have to keep their fingers crossed.