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While the pipeline was (is?) reachable by divers, I still favor a blockage/poor maintenance as the most likely theory, followed by sabotage from within NordStream's operation.
Thing is that the two pipelines blew something like 18 hours apart that strikes me as a long time for a group of divers and their support vessel to sit around waiting to be caught. If one were planning to destroy the pipes by planting bombs on the exterior, I would expect those bombs to be on a timer to allow the divers to already be long gone when shit goes down, and I would expect timers would be set to detonate simultaneously so as to minimize the risk of a bomb being discovered before it had gone off.
Poor maintenance that just happened to cause exactly what USA had wanted for more than 10 years and has pretty much said they would do if they have to.
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You should read it -- it's detailed and seems plausible. (IANANS)
The source claims that a timed explosion was the original plan, but concerns were raised that having stuff blowing up 2 days after a mine-sweeping exercise would ruin plausible deniablity -- so a remote trigger set off by a specific signature generated by a sono-buoy that the Norwegians could drop whenever they wanted during the course of normal operations was deployed.
I don't think the blockage theory can explain N.S. II blowing up -- wasn't it non-operational at the time? (not to mention that simultaneous events in two pipelines which have not exploded in the past seems a bit unlikely)
Off topic, but can you expand IANANS? Google says "I Am Not A Native Speaker", but that doesn't make sense in context I don't think (though if that is what you mean, congratulations on your impeccable English). Maybe "I Am Not A National Securitist"? Or "I Am Not A Nord Stream"?
I thought it was "I Am Not A Naval Specialist."
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I have not been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, do not have over 300 confirmed kills, am not trained in gorilla warfare and I'm definitely not the top sniper in the entire US armed forces.
Ah. That'd do it. Thanks.
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The pipes were pressurized but there was no flow which is pretty much the exact scenario in which you would expect a blockage to develop.
As for the rest, it all sounds way to "clever" to me. Too many steps and too many people involved. Where as lax safety standards (possibly helped along by someone quietly disabling a failsafe or three) strikes me as reasonably "on brand" given how often other bits of infrastructure in Russia seem to explode.
IDK man, we have no way of really knowing at this point. (or maybe ever)
But the hydrate plug thing was also promoted only by basically one I-am-very-smart type IIRC? I see no particular reason to believe him either -- and I do have serious technical doubts about how this would happen in a non-operational, brand new pipeline which I assume would be full of retail-ready (ie. pretty dry) gas.
P-T curve for methane hydrate formation is here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Methane_Hydrate_phase_diagram.jpg
Looks like under about 4-5 MPa you are safe -- presumably this is something that Russian pipeline engineers are aware of? I see no reason to keep your dormant pipeline pressurized more than that, but I'm not a pipeline engineer either, so who knows.
The level of detail in this new story is pretty impressive if fabricated -- that doesn't make it true, but I couldn't see anything implausible there.
Seafloor temperatures in the Baltic Sea can be about 0-5C, so you may be looking at the wrong part of the graph. From here, you have an average gas pressure of 16,300 kPa and temperature of 5C, which puts you clear above the line. (in the average case, to say nothing of in extremis)
This article also says that the rupture was found when pressure in NS-2 dropped from "dropped from 105 to 7 bar overnight". 10,500 kPa at 5C.
If you want independent, pre-2022 corroboration that this is indeed a thing, you can see here
The first link is for an operating pipeline, which is as I'd expect -- the second does seem to indicate that they were keeping it at pretty high pressures for whatever reasons though, so hydrate formation was certainly a possibility.
Questions remain as to why the Russians would be fooling around with a pipeline that nobody was using -- "Russians dumb" is a nice catch-all argument, but not really very convincing. "Russians lazy" doesn't really work in this case, as the lazy thing to do would be to leave the pipeline alone.
Also you and @HlynkaCG will need to explain why the Swedes claim to have found "foreign objects" and "explosives residue" around the incident site:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-18/nord-stream-explosions-were-caused-by-sabotage-sweden-concludes?srnd=premium-europe
I hadn't seen this the last time I looked into the hydrate plug thing, but it seems pretty dispositive?
The Swedish claims are largely why I've adjusted my view of the hydrate stuff down from maybe 60% to 40%. I don't think it's enough to discount it completely, just because the details from the Swedish Public Prosecutor (Mats Ljungqvist) at the investigating authority (aklagare.se) have been pretty woeful. It's been impossible to find anything substantive even going through all the swedish language reports.
You're starting to require a lot of incompetence everywhere with this theory -- what should be the prior on hydrate plugs blowing up pipelines? I know that hydrate is a problem in pipelining, but it's pretty rare for NG pipelines to explode in dramatic fashion for any reason on a given day -- now take the third power of that number, and multiply by the chance of Sweden incorrectly detecting explosive residue and I think the prior is getting pretty small to come up with a 40% chance of this event unfolding as it did.
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.
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The hydrate plug theory is basically that leaving a pipe non-operational for a long time and then trying to unilaterally unplug it was rolling the dice on spectacular failure.
But was NS II ever operational? I guess there was some gas in it (probably to prevent contamination/corrosion) but AFAIK no production pumping had ever been done on it. (and nobody was trying to make it otherwise at the time, so it's not clear why they'd be unplugging it at that moment either)
The pipe was pressurised with gas (which was almost certainly very slushy in parts). If the Russians wanted to make sure that the pipe was in a ready-to-supply state (or if some gazprom official had been making representations this had been the case), plugs are cleared through careful depressurisation and slowly melting them. Depressuring unilaterally too quickly could create a pressure gradient over any hydrate plugs and accelerate them off down the pipe.
Why would it be slushy? It's dried methane, already processed for consumption I think -- and here's the P-T curve for hydrate formation, which seems to indicate that you can keep gas in the pipe indefinitely with no issues so long as you don't ramp up to higher pressures. Which I'm not sure why you would do if you were forbidden from pumping gas at the time.
A lot of theories around this war seem to require every Russian to be a moron -- which is almost certainly wrong, and in any case a canonical example of underestimating your enemy.
Per my other comment, I'd expect the pipes on the seafloor to be at >10,000 kPa at <5C, sufficient for hydrate formation.
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How could poor maintenance destroy two separate pipelines nearly simultaneously, while producing shockwaves that everyone agrees look like they come from high explosives? And why would they blow up right next to the Swedish and Danish undersea border, if not to complicate an investigation by blurring jurisdiction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sabotage#/media/File:Nord_Stream_gas_leaks_2022.svg
This has to be sabotage. And since it is sabotage, the most obvious conclusion is that it's anti-Russian sabotage. It's a Russian pipeline, something that Russia paid for, something that Russia hoped to use to lessen trans-Atlantic unity and bring Germany closer to them. It's absence means higher profits for American energy exports, higher reliance of Europe on America, stronger influence of Ukraine and Baltics on Russia-Europe energy exports and poorer Euro-Russian relations.
The US has the world's most powerful navy, a navy with a considerable presence in the Baltic. The US leads NATO and has enormous global influence. The investigation is being conducted by a NATO country and a NATO hopeful, excluding Russia, the aggrieved party. Surely the most likely conclusion is that it's a NATO operation, probably formulated and executed by the US! People have raised the idea of Russia playing 4D chess to demonstrate that they were committed to cutting ties with Europe, that it was a false-flag operation to worsen NATO unity...
But this is a pretty contrived argument. If the Norway-Poland gas pipeline that recently opened blew up, would they say it was clearly a NATO sabotage attack? No, the party that would gain in that scenario is obviously Russia and so Russia would be the primary suspect.
Pretty easily actually. Especially if the issue was "helped along" by somebody working for NordStream. The pipes were pressurized but product hadn't been flowing for months which means plenty of time for water to seep in and start forming methane hydrate. IE the liquid natural gas turns into a solid. You let that go on long enough and it becomes rather hard not blow to the pipe up entirely by accident. The Water hammer effect is bad enough when dealing with a fluid that is relatively inert, never mind one that's actually volatile.
Water at 210 ft of pressure does not and will not ever "seep in" to a pipeline at 105 bar / 3500 ft pressure. Any water in NS1/NS2 was what couldn't be taken out at the point of injection / compression.
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That says "water hammer", not "natural gas hammer". It has nothing to do with "volatility" and everything to do with incompressibility which gasses lack. The increase in pressure caused by instantaneously stopping the average flow of the pipeline is well under one percent.
The term "natural gas" as it's used in this context is just another name for methane and is not indicative of phase state. Despite the name, the fluid that flows through a natural gas pipeline is a liquid not a gas, and as a liquid is incompressible (or more accurately comes pre-compressed) wich is why the formation of methane hydrate and other condensates on the interior walls of the pipeline are something that has to be actively monitored and guarded against.
Occams razor holds that the theory requiring the fewest assumptions/steps is the most likely. Accordingly, which of these scenarios sounds more plausible given what we know? Some whacky Tom Clancy-esque scheme involving hundreds of people across half a dozen countries was executed successfully and in complete secrecy outside Hersh's unnamed source? or Russian industrial safety standards being a bit shit?
Butane and propane liquify just fine at room temperature, but methane does not. Methane has to be below -80C in order to form a liquid, and therefore cannot be transported through a pipeline as a liquid. Liquids can end up in the pipelines anyway, but that is not the same thing and requires an additional detail to be specified -- something that cuts against your Occam's razor argument.
Whether you think it's a priory super unlikely that a military would ever attempt a clandestine operation and only kinda get caught is really beside my point.
You're neglecting pressure, critical pressure for Methane is around 50 bar as I recall which means it will be either be a liquid or a super critical fluid depending on where exactly we are at on phase chart.
No HylnaCG, I am not. It boggles my mind that you'd double down with such confident counter assertions without checking if you understand what is being said or whether you have your facts straight. Google "critical temperature" and "critical temperature methane", then reread my comment. Then maybe google "supercritical fluid compressibility".
Yes you are, material phase has two components, temperature and pressure. This is what allows you to boil water with little more than your own body-heat by stepping into a hypobaric chamber. The whole point of a critical point is that it is a discontinuity in the phase diagram, the pressure at which the medium in question starts to behave less like a compressible gas and more like an liquid (or solid) regardless of temperature.
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No, any methane in a normal natural gas pipeline is not liquid and will never be a liquid. The critical temperature of methane is -82 C and actual liquid natural gas as made is much colder. It takes special built terminals and a ton of refrigeration and a ton of very expensive insulation. Any methane in a transmission pipeline is either gas or supercritical
Iran-Contra? Manhattan Project? US bombing Cambodia? I mean I generally agree with you that complicated conspiracies' are hard to keep secret. But at least you have to admit that maybe your perception is flawed as you have no idea what the success rate is by definition, as they remain a secret and you only hear about the ones that are revealed.
Supercritical in this case -- the series of engineering case studies of NS 1 linked by @sansampersamp above are frikkin fascinating:
Transportation of Natural Gas in Dense Phase – Nord Stream 1
Part 2: Nord Stream Pipelines – Multiple Parallel Paths to Success or Failure?
Nord Stream Long Distance Gas Pipeline – Part 3 Application of Basic and AGA equations for estimating maximum gas flow in a long‐distance pipeline
It's quite a thing actually -- they are (were) pumping the gas with no booster stations, compressing it to 3190 psi (using a mere half-million horsepower) and having it arrive in Germany still at 1500 psi, enough to distribute it a little ways from the pipeline terminus.
AIUI hydrates are less likely to form in dense phase natural gas, which is one of the advantages of this kind of pipeline -- is that right?
No, that would seem to be a disadvantage of a high pressure pipeline based on the methane hydrate phase diagram you linked, looking at the chart as pressure goes up so does methane hydrate formation.
Supercritical methane: above -82 C and 46 bar
NS1/2 Operating from your first link: 2 to 6 C and 220 to 106 bar
Methane hydrate from the phase diagram you linked elsewhere in the thread: NS1/2 is pretty much exclusively operating in the methane hydrate range, at 2 - 6 C it looks like you need to be under maybe 20 bar to be out of the methane hydrate zone.
So if NS 1 has been operating in the methane hydrate zone for 20+ years why has it not had any issues until now? Well if no water is in the gas stream then no methane hydrate can form. And going off of steam tables and partial pressures at the injection state of 220 bar and 6 C the water content is 43 ppm, which does not leave much water at all for methane hydrate formation. Even less if they stuck the gas stream through a final dehydration step.
Given the above I really question the methane hydrate theory, especially in NS2. I could see at least being possible over time in NS1 as a build up they ignored. But still very doubtful, you'd have to assume that the Russians and Germans both ignored it. For NS2 which hasn't ever been sending gas through, any methane hydrate would be forming out of at most 43 ppm of water that was originally in the pipe when pressurized. Which is a very small amount of methane hydrate.
Above is also assuming that the Russians were not adding any kind of methane hydrate inhibitor to their gas. Or doing any further dehydration after compressing and cooling. Either way the gas is very dry to begin with, so there is not much water to form into methane hydrate, so there won't be much methane hydrate.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Methane_Hydrate_phase_diagram.jpg
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/methane-d_1420.html
https://www.thermopedia.com/content/1150/
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Whats the argument multiple pipes blew up at the same time from this? The occams razor bit would seem to fail when three pipes are blowing up at the same time and the same place.
Also the people keeping it secret are guys who specifically trained to keep it secret and no doubt relish getting security clearances.
They didn't blow up at the same time though, see my original comment.
Likewise, when you're actually in that sort of the the first thing you learn is that every "jump" a secret has to make is an opportunity for it to be exposed, the more people who know, the more organizations in the loop the less of a secret it becomes, which is exactly my prior on a scheme involving hundreds of people across half a dozen different countries being executed successfully without being immediately exposed is pretty close to zero.
I thought they blew up quicker and not 18 hrs. Still weird three same day from real issues.
While I can't rule out divers, my suspicion is that whether through incompetance or intentional sabotage someone created a condition that was likely to result in a catastrophic failure if not corrected and then that condition was not corrected.
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Look up the compressibility of methane hydrate.
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According to the article, the bombs were planted during BALTOPS 22 in June, while the explosions were on Sep 26.
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