Oil companies protect Middle Eastern coral reefs

Various oil companies are taking an interest in research projects to advance the conservation, management, and sustainable use of coral reefs in the Middle East. Coral reefs, home to fish and other marine animals, have a very slow growth rate. In previous decades, researchers have blamed the oil industry for damaging coral reefs.

Saudi Aramco installed 36 moored buoys around the coral-reef islands of Jana, Karan, and Kuran. The oil company worked with Saudi Arabia’s Environmental Protection Department to provide fishing boats and recreational-dive vessels with an alternative to dropping anchors in the Red Sea.

Boaters hook their lines to the buoy pickup line—preventing coral colonies from being damaged by anchors and their steel chains.

In the southern Arabian Gulf off Abu Dhabi and eastern Qatar, Dolphin Energy Ltd. contributed $500,000 to a coral study coordinated by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
Total SA and Occidental Petroleum Corp. helped finance that study, “Coral Reef Investigation in Abu Dhabi and Eastern Qatar.”

Total owns 39.62% interest in Yeman LNG project. During project planning, the stakeholders hired a French consultancy, Creocean, whose marine environmental researchers identified 79 species of coral, of which some are 400 years old. Consequently, Yemen LNG redesigned part of its site and shoreline work in the port of Balhaf on the Gulf of Aden in southern Yemen to protect the coral.