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Notes -
Did the US blow up the Nord Stream Pipeline?
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream
That was linked to me and it appeals to my sense of - conspiracy? warmongering? ... But I also don't really understand if it could be true.
What's the consensus here about the pipeline?
(I don't really even care if we discuss the article, it's long and I don't know who the person is - just interested in all kinds of thoughts)
While the pipeline was (is?) reachable by divers, I still favor a blockage/poor maintenance as the most likely theory, followed by sabotage from within NordStream's operation.
Thing is that the two pipelines blew something like 18 hours apart that strikes me as a long time for a group of divers and their support vessel to sit around waiting to be caught. If one were planning to destroy the pipes by planting bombs on the exterior, I would expect those bombs to be on a timer to allow the divers to already be long gone when shit goes down, and I would expect timers would be set to detonate simultaneously so as to minimize the risk of a bomb being discovered before it had gone off.
You should read it -- it's detailed and seems plausible. (IANANS)
The source claims that a timed explosion was the original plan, but concerns were raised that having stuff blowing up 2 days after a mine-sweeping exercise would ruin plausible deniablity -- so a remote trigger set off by a specific signature generated by a sono-buoy that the Norwegians could drop whenever they wanted during the course of normal operations was deployed.
I don't think the blockage theory can explain N.S. II blowing up -- wasn't it non-operational at the time? (not to mention that simultaneous events in two pipelines which have not exploded in the past seems a bit unlikely)
The pipes were pressurized but there was no flow which is pretty much the exact scenario in which you would expect a blockage to develop.
As for the rest, it all sounds way to "clever" to me. Too many steps and too many people involved. Where as lax safety standards (possibly helped along by someone quietly disabling a failsafe or three) strikes me as reasonably "on brand" given how often other bits of infrastructure in Russia seem to explode.
IDK man, we have no way of really knowing at this point. (or maybe ever)
But the hydrate plug thing was also promoted only by basically one I-am-very-smart type IIRC? I see no particular reason to believe him either -- and I do have serious technical doubts about how this would happen in a non-operational, brand new pipeline which I assume would be full of retail-ready (ie. pretty dry) gas.
P-T curve for methane hydrate formation is here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Methane_Hydrate_phase_diagram.jpg
Looks like under about 4-5 MPa you are safe -- presumably this is something that Russian pipeline engineers are aware of? I see no reason to keep your dormant pipeline pressurized more than that, but I'm not a pipeline engineer either, so who knows.
The level of detail in this new story is pretty impressive if fabricated -- that doesn't make it true, but I couldn't see anything implausible there.
Seafloor temperatures in the Baltic Sea can be about 0-5C, so you may be looking at the wrong part of the graph. From here, you have an average gas pressure of 16,300 kPa and temperature of 5C, which puts you clear above the line. (in the average case, to say nothing of in extremis)
This article also says that the rupture was found when pressure in NS-2 dropped from "dropped from 105 to 7 bar overnight". 10,500 kPa at 5C.
If you want independent, pre-2022 corroboration that this is indeed a thing, you can see here
The first link is for an operating pipeline, which is as I'd expect -- the second does seem to indicate that they were keeping it at pretty high pressures for whatever reasons though, so hydrate formation was certainly a possibility.
Questions remain as to why the Russians would be fooling around with a pipeline that nobody was using -- "Russians dumb" is a nice catch-all argument, but not really very convincing. "Russians lazy" doesn't really work in this case, as the lazy thing to do would be to leave the pipeline alone.
Also you and @HlynkaCG will need to explain why the Swedes claim to have found "foreign objects" and "explosives residue" around the incident site:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-18/nord-stream-explosions-were-caused-by-sabotage-sweden-concludes?srnd=premium-europe
I hadn't seen this the last time I looked into the hydrate plug thing, but it seems pretty dispositive?
The Swedish claims are largely why I've adjusted my view of the hydrate stuff down from maybe 60% to 40%. I don't think it's enough to discount it completely, just because the details from the Swedish Public Prosecutor (Mats Ljungqvist) at the investigating authority (aklagare.se) have been pretty woeful. It's been impossible to find anything substantive even going through all the swedish language reports.
You're starting to require a lot of incompetence everywhere with this theory -- what should be the prior on hydrate plugs blowing up pipelines? I know that hydrate is a problem in pipelining, but it's pretty rare for NG pipelines to explode in dramatic fashion for any reason on a given day -- now take the third power of that number, and multiply by the chance of Sweden incorrectly detecting explosive residue and I think the prior is getting pretty small to come up with a 40% chance of this event unfolding as it did.
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