Pressure leaks hit undersea Nord Stream pipelines | Hacker News Reader

Pressure leaks hit undersea Nord Stream pipelines

politico.eu

34 pointslb1lf56 comments

It is exceedingly unlikely that this is an accident, seeing as no less than three separate pipelines were punctured at different locations within hours of each other.

While none of the pipelines were currently operational, this basically ensures that even if some agreement could be reached with Russia to resume gas imports (not very likely!), it will not be possible in the short term, seeing as the operator claims damages of an unparallelled scale, without going into details.

Presumably this means security around the new Norway-Poland gas pipeline to be opened one of these days is tightened. The seas it runs through are very shallow, so if throwing sufficient resources on it, it should be possible to keep anything larger than a herring from getting close without being noticed.

If I could put on my amateur geo-political-analyst hat for a moment, who could be behind this and why?

Seems like a Putin move, since he dared using (probably) a sub in other nations' waters. Reason? To show Europe he means business? To show Europe he's not planning to rewind anything to the way things were in 2021?

If one is of a sufficiently dark view, it may even be some western power wishing to drive home the point that Russia will not - full stop - export gas in any significant quantity to Europe anytime soon.

I would believe it more likely to be the Russians testing the waters, so to speak - finding out how far you can go sabotaging infrastructure.

After all, starting with two non-operational pipelines makes consequences less severe at both ends, while gaining the perpetrator some experience how to evade detection. (Which may come in handy later!)

> it may even be some western power wishing to drive home the point that Russia will not - full stop - export gas in any significant quantity to Europe anytime soon

Then it would be incompetent. There is political resolve against Russia in Europe. Keeping the ability to bomb the pipes is one thing. Doing it in the midst of that resolve would be self defeating.

-But that resolve is feared to be weakened by falling temperatures in Continental Europe.

Surely it cannot be completely outside the realm of the possible that Someone(tm) helped EU politicians do The Right Thing(tm) by ensuring they couldn't give in to Russian demands this winter even if they'd wanted to?

(I believe this one's on the Russians - but I can see other actors finding it beneficial that Russian exports cannot easily be resumed. Especially as long as the Kremlin denying it had anything to do with something is largely seen as evidence it did indeed have something to do with it.)

> it cannot be completely outside the realm of the possible that Someone(tm) helped EU politicians do The Right Thing(tm) by ensuring they couldn't give in to Russian demands this winter even if they'd wanted to?

Could be. But doing it now and like this (three simultaneous incidents that are also highly repairable) would be stupid. If it’s American it’s because placed mines went off early.

-Easily repairable may be a stretch, it is my understanding there are no shutoff valves along the length of the pipeline, so if they're all breached (4 pipes, each ~1200km long, slightly over 1m in diameter) then that's about 5B liters of water which needs to be pumped out after whatever damage done where they were punctured has been repaired.

(Presumably the water inrush is slowed by the escaping gas sufficiently so that the pipeline doesn't sustain further damage, but I'm just guessing. Being an electrical engineer this is way outside what I dabble with on a day-to-day basis)

I'm curious why you're avoiding the obvious party: the USA did this.

Biden even stated he would do it.

https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-germanys-scholz-stress-u...

It's impossible to completely rule out some sort of US sponsored covert action, but that seems highly unlikely. The risks outweigh any possible rewards. If the operation went wrong and got exposed the political fallout would be catastrophic.

Right now the US is the only country really "winning" the war in Ukraine so there's no need to do anything so crazy.

The US has done terrible things nonstop the past decades and it hasn’t suffered from any kind of political fallout.

> If the operation went wrong and got exposed the political fallout would be catastrophic.

No worse than the US blatantly overthrowing numerous democratically-elected governments. There was zero fallout for any of that.

The US has long considered itself immune to criticism when it comes to crimes against humanity, such as this.

Watching Americans fall over themselves to deny this fact is not fun, at all. It seems we are indeed destined for further fallout as a result ..

Ah, this analysis is in the same ballpark as misinterepting what Bill Gates said about vaccines and lowering the rate of population growth in Africa as "Bill Gates wants to lower the population in Africa!" and then concluding that Bill Gates started Covid so he can vaccinate and kill people, "see, he even stated so!".

Nord stream 2 had already been halted; Biden already got what he wanted. Far more likely IMO is that Putin did it hoping to blame it on the US to divide NATO.

NS2 was completed and ready for use, in spite of the US' worst efforts over the years to prevent its completion. The only issue keeping NS2 from usage was policy, and there is a great risk that the US' will not get its way, policy-wise, over Europe.

So destruction ensured the NS2 would not be used for peaceful energy economy between Russia and Europe.

It could also be Putins way of saying; see what I can do. I can do the same to the pipelines from Norway. There has been a lot of unidentified drone sightings in the Norwegian part of the North Sea in the last week.

There are two scenarios.

1. Ukraine or pro-Ukrainian forces.

2. Russia. Attack the gas market which just settled, and raise the prices again.

There is another option which is being discussed in Norwegian media now - that the Russians have used the pipelines essentially for storage of excess gas (Seeing as the pipelines are basically, combined, a 5M cubic meter pressure vessel) That would go a long way towards explaining how several ruptures happened in relatively short succession - pipes being loaded up with too much gas (after all, the more gas stored, the more money in the bank for later on!) Once the first one burst, someone probably re-evaluated that idea, but letting off gas in sufficient quantities fast enough may not have been possible. Of course, if this was indeed the case, I assume it will very soon be very evident - I can't imagine that the rupture caused by an external force will be indistinguishable from that of it rupturing due to overpressure.

Coincidentally the Baltic Pipe becomes operational this week, might as well be a larger international operation. Operation which Putin with Schröder will certainly not like, and which will give hiccups to Merkel.

Metastable scenario is metastable. Which quantum of energy or momentum broke the metastability is simply not an important question.

Peter Zeihan has repeatedly pointed out that permanently ending Russian oil exports is now within the reach of even Latvia's navy.

Occam's razor applies here. In the past, militaries would burn the boats and bridges behind them to ensure no retreat within their ranks. So now it doesn't matter how cold it gets this winter, you will ride with the US/NATO on this adventure whether you like it or not.

Occam razor here would be internal fighting about Russia factions. The cost/benefit of getting discovered vs not here are not in favor of any external NATO-ish player since there is already enough cohesion, while getting caught would be catastrophic. Literally little to gain and all to lose. And the temporal difference between the reported seismic events is also against the idea of an external country doing it: you wouldn't wait that long between events since it would massively increase the risk of getting discovered. If you are doing a proper sabotage you'd have events close to each other (30m or so) or very spread (days away)

The US/NATO/Ukraine has 100% control over the media narrative in the West, it would be impossible to "get caught". Anything that comes out that is against the desired narrative is simply waved away as Russian propaganda.

Potentially sending gas via this pipeline was one of the last remaining bargain cards for Russia. In case of harsh winter they could use it to pressure European countries (cough Germany cough) into lifting the sanctions. There is no logical reason as to why Russia would have been attacking it's own pipeline.

It's not out of question that there could be a faction in Russia that would want to undermine the current regime.

Edit: Or it could be a play by the current regime against any competing factions.

Lots of people in Russia have family in Ukraine

That didn’t seem to stop an invasion and bombing campaign.

I don't know, maybe stopping a full on military juggernaut led by a demagogue in power takes a more effort than a precision attack on an economic asset on an unguarded civilian (if strategic) asset with 500km long single point of failure

a faction with a submarine ?

Hey, Iv seen this movie!

They said it was 60-70 meters deep. You could hit them with an anchor and it happens regularly with different types of cables and pipes. Shouldn’t be too hard to mess one up with a decent size boat.

I am not an expert on this topic, far from, but I would expect that a pipeline with a working pressure of 200 bar cannot be damaged by an anchor

If that anchor had a couple of hundred kilos of explosives attached to it, it might...

(Swedish seismic survey suggested the shock as the pipeline ruptured was consistent with an explosion 'equivalent to a couple hundred kilos of dynamite')

I believe the pipeline walls are just north of 40mm thick, by the way)

Also well within professional scuba diving range. No submarine needed. Just a "fishing trawler."

Drug cartels have submarines, Peter Madsen had a submarine. But if anyone is seriously working on overthrowing the Russian government, they would need to gain support from the military sooner or later.

There is a logical reason for Russia. Making us suspicious of each other.

German citizens will be suspecting USA. Exactly what Putin would want right now.

Apparently that pipe costs $6B on the shores and $8B on the underwater infrastructure and it is expected bring many billions of dollars of profit to Russia.

That would be one expensive propaganda operation, something like dronning a TSMC Fab in the mids to a chip crisis.

By Taiwan.

Anybody could destroy this pipeline, me myself included. I watched the pipe-laying ship from Finnish "Suuri-Pisi" Island while kayaking. https://youtu.be/0P-wd3qzCBA?t=526

So I know exactly where the pipeline goes. Nothing prevents me from packing some dynamite and Arduino-based timer in water-proof box and do some more kayaking on some dark October night.

I see this type of comment all the time, you are vastly underestimating the skill required to do the thing you hypothesize.

Spend 15 minutes walking through the scenario, there is a lot that can go wrong with your simple plan.

Of course it is possible, but you would need to find the intersection of 1. Willing / Desire to blow up the pipeline 2. Have the skills to create an underwater bomb of correct properties to blow up a pipeline.

1 & 2 is not "Anybody". Its a relatively small set of the worlds population, probably someone with mining skills, engineering skills, probably diving skills and/or former military.

No worries. I already revised my plan. I would 3D-print Raspberry-based submersible, which would find sea bottom and then proceed South-East from Suuri-Pisi and magnetically recognize metallic oblong object. Only problem is the availability of explosive material. But maybe I can buy bombs from immigrant gangs of Stockholm....

If you think that building an autonomous 3d printed submarine with underwater navigation and pipeline detection is the easy part and creating the explosives the hard one, then I think you should do more research on both topics :)

Come on son. I replaced tube-based Russian missile control with 8080 microprocessor while in the Finnish Army 1978.

Rumour is that this solution was field-tested in Afghanistan when Russians made KR580VM80A-processor.

> Come on son.

Haha clap clap mate, and I am an aerospace engineer in 2022, I know what I'm talking about too. I have programmed an 8051 in assembly too, old guy

It is not 1978 anymore

"Global Warming Effect".

If I had to bet on who did it, I would guess Russia. Not because it’s in their best interests (it’s not) but because the Russian state planning and executing something very bad for itself is completely expected.

For the conspiracy theorists claiming this is the US... The current US administration has made climate change it's number one priority. It's extremely doubtful they would damage the environment in this way with methane.

Good thing politicians are never duplicitous liars. We can trust them to do exactly what they say and know they will never dare betray their constituents.

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