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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.
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.
Three pipelines blew up on the same day.
Two pipelines blew up roughly 18 hours apart.
A hypothetical: Either through incompetence or intentional sabotage someone opens a valve or disables a failsafe creating a condition in both pipes where in an explosion is becomes increasingly likely as time goes on. Some indeterminant number of hours later the first pipe goes boom and the second some time after that.
The only real reason to buy the diver story that I've seen is the Swedish prosecutors' claims that they found explosive residue and foreign materials at the site, but even that strikes me as a pretty thin. Ok what sort of explosive? What sort of materials?
If the Hersh account is correct, it should be RDX residue (readily identifiable via spectrometric methods). Another frustrating area where the slightest detail from the Swedish office would shed a lot of light (ammonium nitrates would raise the probability of non-state actors, on the other hand).
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