Playing Hide-and-Seek! With an Oil Tanker.

Supertankers loaded with crude have been making the news recently, mostly because they can’t find a place to sell the stuff. These tankers departed from Kurdistan, but Iraq claims the oil they carry is their property and the Kurds don’t have the right to sell it.  This global political dispute is playing out on the water in an interesting, albeit risky, way: the tankers are unable to come into port, so are lingering offshore, fully loaded, waiting for some kind of resolution.

Late in July, we tracked the tanker United Leadership as it roamed across the Mediterranean and loitered in the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco.

Now we’re following one that’s a little closer to home:  the United Kalavrvta has been parked in a holding pattern in the northern Gulf of Mexico about 100 nautical miles southeast of Galveston. A few days ago Reuters noted that the tanker had “disappeared” from satellite tracking data, speculating they may be trying to offload their 42-million-gallon cargo onto another vessel.  The US Coast Guard weighed in with this comment: 

A Coast Guard official said the vessel in the Gulf of Mexico might have turned off its beacon, sailed beyond antennas that monitor transponders, or perhaps some antennas might have been taken out of service.

Um, that’s not quite right: tankers are required by international maritime law, AND by US Coast Guard regulations, to continually broadcast their position, heading, speed and other information using a Class A AIS system when they are between ports. There should be no threat of piracy in the US Gulf of Mexico, so the captain has no legal justification for turning the system off, until the vessel is safely in port.  Which it is not.  And the AIS signals sent by the relatively powerful Class A transmitters on tankers and other large cargo vessels are readily picked up by AIS satellites, which can cover the entire ocean.  If the captain turned off his AIS, the US Coast Guard needs to go pay him a visit and enforce US law.  

So where is the United Kalavrvta?  Right where it’s been for weeks, since at least August 4.  See below for the details: our vessel-tracking expert Bjorn prepared this series of maps and info yesterday, using our satellite AIS data feed from exactEarth.  We hope the Coast Guard can make use of this to resolve the inconsistencies in broadcasting by this loaded supertanker.  After all, it’s hurricane season in the Gulf, and a fully loaded tanker that is not broadcasting its location to all the vessels in the vicinity is a hazard to navigation, and a potentially colossal environmental disaster waiting to happen.  
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Latest Position at: 2014-09-02 19:23:57 UTC
Latitude: 28.585117 Longitude: -94.249783
Course: 252.0°

The United Kalavrvta is at anchor in the same location off Galveston. They resumed AIS broadcast but with some unusually long gaps between positions. Their last position was about 32 hours ago. Between the 26th and the 28th there was a 47 hour gap, between the 28th and the 30th there was a 53 hour gap. 

Just for grins, we thought we’d take a look to see if this tanker appears on Landsat-8 satellite imagery.  The most recent cloud-free image for the area is from August 4.  Sure enough, there is a large vessel at precisely the location where the AIS data place United Kalavrvta on that day: