To a layman, a car mechanic is a car mechanic is a car mechanic. But in reality, there are transmission experts, body guys, tire guys etc etc. A general mechanic may know enough about transmissions, but she/he would get a transmission guy to do transmission stuff and a body guy to do body work.
It is absolutely possible but not at all likely. Failures in Nuclear Plants and Airplanes do happen but it usually not one failure but a chain of failures. The risks of a failure event like you are describing (considering likelihood of a failure event, impact of a failure event, detectability of failure event, and the ensuing mitigation of such and event) are extremely low. These are basic interlocks in the system. Its as basic as requiring the brake to be pressed in new cars before the ignition will work. It is as basic as the safety interlock that prevents modern cars from being thrown into reverse while driving. No matter how smart or dumb the car driver (operator) is - these interlocks are virtually impossible to disengage. Operators are actually very smart people too.
Again - I have background that makes this scenario : totally unimaginable. Its wrong on many levels. Let me explain why :
The compressor station (pump) at the entry to the pipeline receives Natural Gas that is already pressurized. It boosts up the pressure using a turbine driven compressor. There is no already pressurized air available to substitute for feed
The Turbine is usually an Aeroderivative i.e. an airplane engine converted to work as a drive. It runs on the methane that comes in the pipeline - and typically a system like LM2500 is 20 MW or so. Bottomline - if there is air in the pipeline in place of natural gas, the turbine will trip.
There are a host of analyzers - often redundant from methane, hydrogen, CO2, water, H2S … all present to ensure that the gas is pipeline is not out of spec - if it is out of spec or can cause explosion (presence of Oxygen), they are designed to auto vent / flare.
Compressors that compress Natural Gas cannot compress Air (for same flow/pressure). For large pipelines like these, a centrifugal compressor is used. The ratio of density of air/natural gas is (29/16) ~ 2. So if you keep the volumetric flow rate the same but substitute Air for Natural Gas, the compressor will require at least twice the power to keep going. It cannot get twice the power - so it will trip.
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The failure event I’m describing is a single bigshot making a stupid decision. There’s no chain of failure required, because once the bigshot makes the stupid decision, all the rest follows from that.
Which would be a problem if we needed the same flow rate. But we don’t, not even remotely close. They were only pumping in gas at a rate necessary to replace what’s lost to leaks. That’s going to be a rate many orders of magnitude lower than the normal operating rate.
As for the rest, if the bigshot says “Do this or you’re fired”, then I’m sure the engineers would find some way to do it. Just like they found a way to make Chernobyl happen.
Two developments in the last week that IMO argue for Russia being responsible:
On 12 October Putin noted that one of the two parallel pipes of NordStream 2 was not damaged and said that “the taps can be turned on”. So much for the sabotage negating Russia’s own options.
NB NordStream 2 is the pipeline that Germany refused operating permission to, so this is a poisoned offer.
On Saturday 8 October rail traffic in North Germany was totally disabled for about three hours by skilful sabotage attacking main system and reserve system: In Herne (North Rhine Westphalia) a cable serving the GSM-R railway mobile network was cut, and in Hohenschönhausen (Berlin), i.e. about 500 km distant, a cable used by the redundant GSM-R system was cut. This is now widely regarded in Germany as a portent of how critical infrastructure can be sabotaged. Disrupting rail traffic even for a matter of hours or days would be deeply damaging to both the German economy and to millions of Germans’ lives. I think someone has sent a message.
Beyond that, do they really have to be that close? I mean, it’s a hollow metal pipe with less pressure inside (7 bar) than outside (~10 bar), so wouldn’t a nearby detonation probably break the pipe?
I mean, we’re all seemingly making the assumption that someone sent a diver down to place a charge, or something like that, when with today’s GPS technology, it’s entirely possible that they just dropped a charge over the pipe and had it detonate later, because with a pipe and 100kg of high explosive, “close enough” is a valid distance. Still takes some know-how, but not nearly as specialized as underwater demolition.
Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday published photographs and film footage taken by an underwater drone at the site near the island of Bornholm where the gas pipeline between Russia and Germany ruptured on 26 September.
They appear to show long tears in the seabed near the concrete-reinforced steel pipe that was not merely cracked but torn apart in an act of suspected sabotage. At least 50 metres of the gas pipeline appeared to be missing, Expressen said.
I think we can eliminate accident or a lone actor in this.
I work in this field. I get to review safety related events at the beginning of each day. A single point failure like you describe where a lone wolf “pumps” air into a natural gas system is not likely. And when I say not likely, it means not likely with 9 sigma (standard deviations) of certainty. While quality is measured in 6 sigma, safety goes with 9 sigma or more.
Here are big safety failures (Oil, Gas and Chemicals related) that resulted in fatalities or injuries or equipment damage : Completed Investigations - Investigations | CSB Please feel free to browse through them - you will not find a single one with ONE point of failure or one lone wolf.
I am not sure how else I can convince you.
Look this is wrong at so so many levels. Every gas compression station is equipped with Nitrogen generators (Membrane or PSA (Pressure Swing Adsorption) systems). These generators make high purity Nitrogen from air. If they run out of Natural Gas supply, then they would “pump” Nitrogen into the system. Nitrogen is used routinely to inert systems or sweep them before operators can open them to work on them.
To give you a simple example, a refinery will have a fire hydrant system. There are pressure sensors on the fire hydrant pipelines (multiple sensors). If any sensor detects low pressure in any line (sensors that trigger shutdowns are triplicated with voting logic like 2 out of 3) , the fire pond pump comes on. If the pump fails to pump (auto detected), then a backup pump comes on and again auto detected. If the backup pump fails too, a faclity wide shutdown is automatically triggered. This cannot be bypassed by an operator. If the pond water level goes down, it will trigger a shutdown too.
A hot connection, when someone will cut a pressurized natural gas line and weld a connection with an air compressor is almost next to impossible.
Agree. Pipelines that have internal explosions rip longitudinally - like this one :
Pipelines ripped by external explosions or seismic movements, rip radially like the images below and also the video above for Nord Stream
As noted in the Wiki article, nothing Hersh has said since he started attacking Obama has been confirmed by others. I’d wait for mainstream sources before I’d believe anything he says.
I mean, that doesn’t necessarily mean the US didn’t commit the sabotage. There are rational cases to be made for (and against) all sorts of different responsible parties. It just means that whatever Hersh is saying is irrelevant because he’s a loon.
One of the men in the article is described as having been working with American intelligence since the Vietnam war. That man was 15 when the Vietnam war ended:
Oh, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of being fifteen again! Trying to cop a feel from Brittany McAlister, sneaking your Dad’s hooch out for your buds, meeting with foreign counterintelligence officials about American security, all while trying to be the big man in the 9th grade.
European and US intelligence officials have obtained tentative intelligence to suggest a pro-Ukrainian saboteur group may have been behind the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, according to reports in the New York Times and German newspaper Die Zeit. German investigators believe the attack on the pipelines was carried out by a team of six people, using a yacht that had been hired by a company registered in Poland and owned by two Ukrainian citizens, according to Die Zeit. Details about the intelligence remain sketchy… But it is suggested that the government of Kyiv did not direct the underwater strike.
Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.
The European intelligence made clear that the would-be attackers were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation, the intelligence report said.
Keeping Zelensky out of the loop would have given the Ukrainian leader a plausible way to deny involvement in an audacious attack on civilian infrastructure that could ignite public outrage and jeopardize Western support for Ukraine — particularly in Germany, which before the war got half its natural gas from Russia and had long championed the Nord Stream project in the face of opposition from other European allies.
The intel was a part of the Discord Leaks which is how we’re finding out about it now.
War is a nasty business and there’s a lot of good reasons to keep intel secret long after it ceases to be operationally relevant. As this awkward leak so ably demonstrates.
Apparently, from what I read after a cursory search, Balticonnector, which is reversible, lately carried gas from Estonia (which is supplied from the main European pipeline system, and from LNG terminals), to Finland, which has weaned itself from Russian gas and is supplied from its LNG terminals and from Balticonnector). It’s unclear to me to which extent Balticonnector’s failure impacts Finland’s energy security. Russia seems to have a more clear motive for Balticonnector than it did for Nord Stream.
