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Comment by bradgessler | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody know what this means in terms of bringing the pipeline back online? I'm assuming it's filling with seawater, which seems like it would cause all sorts of problems between the salt and debris.

Is it a matter of repairing the breaches, removing the water, cleaning the pipeline out, and pressurizing it or is this pipeline effectively destroyed?

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Due to the special inside coating to reduce friction, seawater ingress would mean the abandonment of the pipeline. It’s just not possible to fix the line without just replacing the entire thing. I theorize it’s possible to run at severely reduced flow rates if they were able to get the water out, but that seems unlikely since the receiving facilities are not designed to handle the tremendous amount of water that would be in the system.

So the pipeline is effectively destroyed. That’s kind of insane.

You are not wrong. It’s a feat of engineering to have a roughly 1200 km pipeline operate smoothly with no safety or reliability issues over 10 years just to get blown up. Billions of dollars just down the drain.

So it’s like Yahoo?

You would think they would have valves or whatever along the pipeline. In case they need to shut off section.

Unfortunately, that is such a huge economic burden to run hydraulic umbilicals the entire length of the line. It’s simply not feasible to control in the middle of such an enormous pipeline. Perhaps, ROV operated valves could be a solution, but generally, with such high pressure fluid on the inside, the valves and areas around the valves would be the relative weak points and would need leak monitoring whereas the current system doesn’t require that.

Is that bit about the coating true? Wikipedia’s article on submarine pipelines says that the inside of petroleum pipelines are not coated. Pipelines are damaged due to accident or natural disaster, so it seems very odd to me that a pipeline would be impossible to repair.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_pipeline

For now, I think the gas escaping is preventing water from rushing in.

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