Princess Empress

Context

On 28 February 2023, the oil tanker Princess Empress was en route from Bataan to Iloilo (Philippines), carrying 800 tonnes of Intermediate Fuel Oil in rough seas, when it suffered engine failure followed by water ingress.

The Princess Empress finally sank 7.5 nautical miles off Baligawan Point (Mindoro Oriental) to a depth of 400 metres. The 20 crew members were rescued by the cargo vessel Efes which was nearby at the time.

The same day, slicks were spotted at the sea surface by the Philippine Coast Guard, which mobilised aircraft and vessels to carry out surveys and take samples.

The owner of the Princess Empress, RDC Reield Marine Services, mandated the Malayan Towage and Salvage Corp (SALVTUG, or MTSC) to carry out response operations at sea (containment and skimming) and spray dispersant under the supervision of the Philippine Coast Guard.

The wreck gradually released its cargo, first contaminating part of the coastline of Oriental Mindoro before reaching the island of Semirara further south and even Palawan, more than 300 km to the south-west.

As the oil leaked out slowly, it continued to wash up on the shore for several weeks, sometimes drifting south, sometimes north-north-west, depending on the prevailing winds and currents.

Actions by Cedre

At the request of the French Embassy in Manila and with funding from Expertise France, Cedre sent an expert on site from 16 to 29 March 2023, to assist the authorities in charge of the spill response.

Through our expert present in the field within a Philippine Coast Guard team, we were able to follow the response operations in progress, both on- and offshore and to gain insight into the strong involvement of all the players, at both national and local level, in managing this incident.

During this mission, Cedre's expert directly provided the Philippine Coast Guards with advice and proposals in real time, based on Cedre's experience, in order to optimise certain response actions or techniques so as to resolve the issues encountered in the field.

At sea, Cedre's expert helped to improve and optimise the positioning of the two tugs involved in the oil recovery operations, advising that they operate in a J- rather than a U-configuration, an adjustment that helped to optimise the collection operation by recovering the oil continuously rather than sequentially.

On the oiled shoreline, Cedre’s expert also took part in several surveys alongside the Philippine Coast Guards and recommended certain clean-up techniques that had already been tried and tested in France, such as the use of concrete mixers to clean oiled pebbles.

Cedre's laboratory, which specialises in pollutant analysis, also provided support to the Marine Environmental Protection Command (MEPCOM), by analysing several samples collected on the polluted shoreline to compare them with the oil from the tanks of the Princess Empress. A study on the pollutant's biodegradability potential was also carried out.