An explosion aboard the Trinity Spirit off the coast of Nigeria last year that killed five workers and left two others unaccounted for stands among the deadliest tragedies on an oil ship or platform in recent years.
The Trinity Spirit fits a pattern of old tankers put to work storing and extracting oil even while on the brink of mechanical breakdowns. This image from video provided by Bolaji John shows the burning Trinity Spirit anchored 15 miles off the coast of Nigeria, which caught fire on Feb. 2, 2022. The ship had no insurance, no flag, and had fallen into a state of disrepair. Five workers were killed and two others left unaccounted for in the blast.
Jan-Erik Vinnem, who has spent his career studying the risks of offshore oil production, said he’s sometimes shocked when he sees pictures of oil ships in Africa.The Trinity Spirit was part of a class of vessels that extracts oil offshore and stores it at sea. They are known as floating production storage and offloading units — FPSOs — or as FSOs, floating storage and offloading units, when used only for storage.
In the same month that the Trinity Spirit caught fire, inspectors found problems with an aging FPSO moored off the coast of Malaysia. The Bunga Kertas was built as an oil tanker in the 1980s, and press coverage of its conversion to an FPSO in 2004 said the vessel had an intended service life of “A lot of these things are foreseeable,” said Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert who helped sound the alarm about the Safer.
Up till the moment of the explosion, there was oil on board. As recently as 2021, according to satellite imagery and ship transponder data, oil was loaded onto a tanker that later docked at a Shell refinery in the Netherlands. Yinka Agidee, an attorney specializing in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector who was not involved in the case, said the Trinity Spirit represented an “accident waiting to happen,” and showed that local authorities failed to enforce their own orders.
Sustaining fuel purchases, food supplies, and “skeletal manpower” wasn’t easy, Orijako said, because “there’s no revenue coming in.” But he managed to fund the minimal operations with family resources, he said, because the FPSO “would be dangerous to abandon.” Oil and gas operators tend to operate on the edge of financial wealth or financial ruin, said David Hammond, founder of the nonprofit Human Rights at Sea.Aganyebi worked in the engine room of the Trinity Spirit. Within a year of joining the crew in 2014, he said, Shebah stopped reliably paying his wages. Lawrence Yorgolo, who operated the crane on the ship, and Pius Orofin, a deck operator — the only other survivors of last year’s fire — alleged the same in interviews with the AP.
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