UKH

How long will the ruptured gas pipes keep spewing gas? Presumably even Russia wouldn't keep pumping gas in at their end, So how can they find a fourth rupture 24 hours later?

Are the pipelines pretty well history now, sea water will flood them and cause irreparable damage?

In reply to Pedro50:

Most of the reports state both pipes are not in use and the residual gas should have dissipated within a week.

The next questions are how will Europe manage this winter with the gas supply shot, what will Europes response be to the pipelines being targeted & the official annexation  declaration tomorrow. Lastly what will Russia consider targeting next outside of Ukraine following their doctrine of non-linear warfare?

In reply to alx:

I’m planning to use as little gas as possible this winter. If I have sit in my down jacket and expedition sallies so be it.

Not only will save cash, but it’s the only way I can stick two fingers at Putin. The more people that can do this the less leverage he has.

Im not expecting the elderly, infirm or those with underlying health conditions to do the same.

And I know on such a small scale it’s effectively meaningless.

In reply to alx:

This sabotage coincided with the opening of the new Baltic pipeline between Norway and Poland, and in close proximity to that pipeline, so I think they've made the threat of the next step clear....

In reply to ScraggyGoat:

I'll join ya. I've got a cupboard of whisky that I've gathered over the years, reckon that'll take the edge off the chill! Cheers!

In reply to ScraggyGoat:

It's not meaningless - enough individual actions will lead to change.

I'm insulating the house to cut my gas usage - if I can get it to the point where I can run the boiler at 45 degrees, I'll ditch the gas and get a heat pump.

In reply to Ciro:

Just gonna leave this here...

https://www.selkbag.co.uk/collections/summer-sale

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

Unfortunately doesn't prevent damp, mould, etc.

I'll keep the thermostat at a temperature that's comfortable in a warm jumper, thickish trousers, socks and slippers but I'm not letting the house get cold.

In reply to alx:

no worries bro.. https://www.worldoil.com/news/2022/9/26/u-s-lng-to-meet-europe-s-energy-nee...

In reply to Ciro:

No, but if you run and adapt to a cold house, you open the windows as long as it’s not blowing a hoolie and that does prevent damp and mold.

Its trying to live in the hinterland that’s the problem.

In reply to Pedro50:

What I don’t understand is why the leaks haven’t been deliberately set on fire to reduce the global warming contribution. 

In reply to wintertree:

Would you want to be the one to put a match to it?

In reply to wintertree:

Paradoxical, burning gas reduces global warming!

In reply to pec:

Torrey Canyon?

In reply to Pedro50:

Not paradoxical when methane is 20x worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

In reply to Pedro50:

That’s why there’s a lot of research into the diet and microbiome of cows to reduce their methane emissions (cow farts).  There’s no reliable way to flare a cow’s emissions…

Edit: Timely news story - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/oil-industry-flaring-less-effective...

In reply to Pedro50:

Commercial natural gas has been around for about 150+ years, and global reserves are likely to dwindle to an un-economical conclusion within the lifespan of a recently born infant. The resulting collapse of civilisation, war, famine, genocide etc etc and the resulting nuclear winter will be nature's sharp correction resulting in a strange epoch of barren urban landscapes, charred doll's heads and deserted Ferris Wheels. A silent brooding nightmare world prowled by pale eyed dog-like Num Nums in the shadows, gnawing on raw radioactive Big Macs in desolate out of town vegetated shopping malls

In reply to wintertree:

Is the gas/air ratio going to allow combustion? You'd expect it to be too gassy at the centre of where the gas hits the surface and too airy some distance away which would mean there must be an ideal "point" somewhere all around the centre.

But would this hemispherical wavefront (can't think of a better way to describe it) be stable enough to support steady combustion or would any instability just snuff it out.

Edit: hemispherical flamefront sounds better 😁

In reply to captain paranoia:

But IIRC methane dissipates in 10-20 years whereas CO2 lasts for hundreds so long term it's not so clear cut.

Edit: as per my post 8:21, it's more clear cut than I thought.

In reply to Pedro50:

Wrong (sorry for being pedantic but), burning gas reduces the immediate increase in global warming. Subtle (?) difference, both increase global warming.

In reply to Pedro50:

I would hope that there are valves at "regular" intervals along the pipes and that when the pipes are not in use these are all closed.

This would mean that only a section would be flooded. How irreparable any damage is would to some extent depend on the time the interior is immersed.

The ruptures may be in different sections, probably are if the saboteurs have any sense. Also, remember that the gas in these pipes is highly pressurised so it takes time for it to all get out.

In reply to Michael Hood:

Methane breaks down into carbon dioxide and water, so it's more damaging initially in the short term with long lasting but less severe damage in the long term.

In reply to Connor Nunns:

Does the resultant CO2 stay in the atmosphere or does some of it get absorbed and "rained out" by the water?

We are basically just arguing around the edges, until the political will is there to think properly long term about global warming, we are all f****d anyway.

In reply to Michael Hood:

It will stay in the atmosphere, the reaction is the same as when methane or other hydrocarbons are burned.

In reply to Connor Nunns:

Thank you, I'll take back my reply to Captain Paranoia then, you either get the short term nasty hit followed by the longer term lesser hit, or you get just the same longer term lesser hit on its own.

Easy to see which is worst of those then.

In reply to Michael Hood:

Ultimately without drastic change yesterday we're doomed. There are so many feedback loops either starting or about to start that it's very likely to become a runaway situation soon.

In reply to wintertree:

Because (someone ran the numbers) the contribution is a (median) additional warming of 0.000016°C which peaks by 2030.

Edit because I actually looked it up.

For context - assuming a "good" CC scenario of 2°C rise over 100 years, average global temperature goes up by 0.00005°C/day (yes, I am aware this is not actually how it works, just a crude comparison). So the nordstream leak is pretty much a fart in a hurricane.

In reply to Ciro:

Perhaps not. The increased security that will no doubt be overrunning the new pipeline would likely mean an attempt by Russia would bring them into direct conflict with a patrolling NATO force. My monies on more thinly veiled but deniable targets.

In reply to Pedro50:

On the subject of flaring....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62917498

In reply to wintertree:

Arstechnica... Very appropriate for cow farts...

In reply to captain paranoia:

The product name that always gets me is Anusol 😁, never used it myself although maybe I should have 

In reply to Michael Hood:

There won’t be sectionalizing valves on a natural gas line like this. The valves have a significantly higher likelihood of leaking than plain pipe, so increasing the risk of a release overall.  I’m pretty certain that the Russians blowing up their own pipeline didn’t appear in the project’s hazard identification!

In reply to George Ormerod:

Oh, no valves means of course more gas to escape and more pipe being flooded.

I'll bet there'll now be a wider range of risks in any hazard identification and hence more impetus for sectionalizing valves in any future undersea pipelines.

In reply to Michael Hood:

I presume they were laid dry (not flooded). Draining then drying it after repair will be one hell of an undertaking!

Shocking to think they're now both probably scrap given the political context.

jk

In reply to captain paranoia:

Got all her albums and a few picture discs.

In reply to jkarran:

Laid dry, but surely water-filled for pressure-testing and conditioning (taken to yield briefly to balance out stresses) - at least, that's what happens on land when fresh water is available.

No idea how you get salt out of the pipe if you have let seawater into the pipe...

In reply to jkarran:

http://www.gazprominfo.com/articles/undersea-tubes/

https://www.piping-world.com/pipeline-pigging-types-procedure

In reply to jkarran:

I don't really understand why Russia would damage their own pipe.

I don't know why another country would either so I'm not doubting it was Russia, only that it seems like a dumb move.

Had Russia just turned off supply and said we'll turn it back on when you do as we say, then they might leverage something of use form the west.

But damaging their own pipe and then denying it surely achieves very little and weakens their hand.

What's the long term play here?

In reply to montyjohn:

I assume to prevent contractual default payments by Gazprom, which would not apply due to force majeure.

In reply to petemeads:

Next up, SpaceX having an unfortunate launch failure obliterating Twitter HQ with a Starship crashing back down…

Of all the posited explanations, the idea it’s been done to get out of some contracts is the one I find most nihilistically depressing; once international megacorps start resorting to military action to settle their disagreements we really have had it.

I still think it’s likely a signal that those who did it are [ballsy/insane - delete as appropriate] enough to actually do it.  I doubt there’s much uncertainty behind closed doors as to who did it.

In reply to wintertree:

My main worry when it started was that it might be used as an "Air bomb" although I'm not sure this is a real thing or was invented for a novel I read years ago (terrorist plot, LNG tanker in NY harbour)

In reply to balmybaldwin:

Concentration of a gas released continuously from a point source subject to diffusion decreases with an exponential term of the inverse distance squared [e^(1/r^2) where r is distance from the source].  This dwarfs the accumulation effects of time and means the concentration of the gas falls off very rapidly with distance from the source, even more so when we consider the effect of winds further diluting the gas and also if assuming the pipe is sealed, the flow rate is not constant but exponentially decreases with a half-life of a day or two.

Without doing the maths and given the size of the release field, I’d intuit that the volume where conditions are close enough to stoichiometric to get a decent fuel air explosion are a hemispheric shell not more than 100 m in thickness starting less than half a km from the centre of the gas plume.  

The bigger issue is the catastrophic effect on buoyancy; any ship going in to the plume could sink.  That’s how one can suppose there was a significant time delay on the explosives…

In reply to wintertree: interesting to note that the WP report suggests Swedish monitoring stations that measure local atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have reported spikes since the pipeline burst, with the methane concentration 20 to 25 percent higher than usual

im not sure where the monitoring stations are in wrt distance and direction or what the wind direction was at the time of release tho
 

In reply to wintertree

the bubble radius was reported (rather precisely) as 765yds ie more than 1/2 km so are you suggestion the explosive limit was inside of the bubble  radius rather than a short distance outside it?

In reply to obi-wan nick b:

Sorry; I thought it was half a km diameter.  Double my guesstimate accordingly…

Monitoring stations - that’ll be 20 to 25 percent higher than almost nothing.  With that and a flow rate estimate you could probably get a decent calculation for where it’s got boom potential…

In reply to montyjohn:

Each bang was 100kg tnt. So will be a bit of a mess.

No gas was going to be sold down these pipes ever, so cheap messaging that this war is for keeps and we can do lots of nasty things without nukes. 

In reply to wintertree:has any modelling been done do you know (I imagine a lot has but is anything published yet?)

In reply to obi-wan nick b:

I haven’t looked re: the pipelines; the solutions for diffusion of a continuous point source are well know analytically (so no need for modelling) so it’s more a case of finding out the release rate and diffusion coefficient and plugging in the relevant numbers.  It’s talked through here [1] including for multiple point sources, with some equations and code.

Strong suspicion that wind and a decreasing release rate and the non-point source nature all make concentration lower than that formula.  If the leak was much closer to the surface, diffusion wouldn’t be appropriate as it would be displacing all the air not diffusing through it, but as it’s spread out by the time it reaches the surface it’s probably valid. You can approximate a non-point release by creating a couple of dozen point sources across the release area with flux spread between them and just summing their results.

[1] - https://nickelnine37.github.io/the-diffusion-equation.html

In reply to wintertree:

It's not military action. It's just a bit of explosive demolition of a redundant facility...

In reply to ian caton:

It happened just as the new line from Norway opened so it’s a good warning shot from the Russians that they can damage Europe’s energy infrastructure. It also was just outside Danish territory that could have been construed as an attack on NATO. Russia is the only credible culprit. 

In reply to George Ormerod:

It was the same reason they were wanting to run drills off the coast of Ireland a while ago. It just happened to be right on top of the landing route for a significant amount of the transatlantic fibre runs. A obvious threat that never occurred as they were chased off by the local fishing fleet. 

In reply to Toerag:

https://www.google.com/search?q=ineos+grangemouth+flaring&oq=ineos+flar...

I lived a few miles from here for 30 years. The flaring was constant. I was told by one of the managers who authorised a flare that one nights flaring burned £25000 worth of gas. This is insane. 

In reply to George Ormerod:

Not everyone agrees with you, including this chap who suggested publicly that it was the USA and gave (imho) some good reasons:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/former-ministers-n...

He then had a full and frank interview with Donald Tusk

I've heard similar from financial contacts who speculate that a number of big players want to move away from the dollar as their main fiat currency, for example into gold, which may lead to a run on the over-valued dollar, and so it's in the USA's interest to weaken the economic environment and play the 'we can save the world' card.

In reply to freeflyer:

To suggest America is responsible is a bit far fetched. They have too much to lose.

First reputation if they got caught, and second triggering a new age of bombing gas and communication routes that the US has plenty of vulnerability to.