Sweden reports a fourth Nord gas leak – News
Sweden’s coast guard has said there are a total of four leaks from the twin Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, not three as previously assumed.
ACCORDING to the Swedish Coast Guard, there are a total of four leaks from the twin Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, not three as previously assumed. The fourth had been known since ruptures were first reported Monday, but only three were mentioned by officials in media reports.
“We have leaks at two positions” outside Sweden, says the coast guard’s spokesperson Mattias Lindholm. “There are two more outside Denmark”.
Initially billed as “unexplained incidents”, the recording of two “massive releases of energy” shortly before and near the site of the gas leaks by the Swedish National Seismic Network has prompted NATO calling the damage “acts of sabotage” and adding that “any deliberate attack on Allied critical infrastructure would be met with a united and decisive response.”
Seismic stations in Denmark, Norway and Finland also recorded the explosions, one of which had a magnitude of 2.3, said Björn Lund from the Norwegian Center for Seismology, which has not done so excluded that a third detonation may have occurred.
The EU issued a similar statement, saying that “any deliberate disruption of European energy infrastructure is completely unacceptable,” and said it will support any investigation aimed at getting full clarity on what happened and why, “and will take further action to to increase our resilience in energy. security.”
In response to the ongoing tensions, Denmark has increased security around energy facilities, while Norway – which has overtaken Russia as Europe’s biggest supplier of natural gas – has said its military will be more visible at its own oil and gas installations.
Although none of the pipelines, which span 1,224 km, were operational at the time – the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was shut down by Russia in August, while Germany stopped Nord Stream 2 shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February – they still contained methane.
Methane has a strong warming effect on our climate and is about 80 times more powerful than CO2 in the first 20 years after it is released.
Although no one is sure how much methane has leaked, there are estimates that it is around 150–300 m m.3, according to Paul Balcombe of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London. He added: “It is unlikely that they [the pipelines] will release all contents, but if only one did it would be about twice as much (~200,000 tons) as the 2015 Aliso Canyon leak in the US (~90,000 tons) which was the worst leak found in the US. It would indeed have a very large environmental and climate impact, even if it emitted a fraction of this.”
Dave Reay, executive director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute at the University of Edinburgh, on the other hand, is more optimistic. “The most direct effect of these gas leaks on the climate is the extra click of the powerful greenhouse gas methane […] they add to the atmosphere. That said, this is a tiny bubble in the ocean compared to the massive amounts of so-called ‘fugitive methane’ released every day around the world due to things like fracking, coal mining and oil extraction.”