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Notes -
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?
Two of them blew up at the same time, then the other one blew up 18 hours later. (or the other way around? I don't remember but the two pipelines are both twinned; one of the NS II lines is still intact I believe)
This seems like an awful lot of blowing things up in one day, which is why I say that "I assume the Russians are comically incompetent in all things" may not be a bad heuristic a lot of the time, but is probably a dangerous thing to base your worldview upon.
Seriously, you are saying that some pipeline operator was trying an operation which everyone knows is difficult and dangerous to clear a plug (which did not urgently need to be cleared, as the pipelines were shut down), noted sensor readings consistent with a catastrophic failure of a couple of multi-billion dollar undersea pipelines, and then tried the same thing on the other pipeline under his control a few hours later!?
No I think they did one action once and differences in local conditions caused the different pipes to fail at different times.
If the pipes had been blown by charges placed by divers I would've expect the explosions to have been much closer together both in terms of time and location, furthermore I would expect to see all 4 pipes cut.
Wouldn't they, like, stop doing that once they blew up the first two pipelines?
Depends on the nature of the unsafe condition. We're talking about a large physical system here, it's not like an operator can just flip the bit for immanent_catastrophic_failure from 1 to 0.
But we know the nature of the condition if the "exploding hydrate plug" thing is true -- they were trying to depressurize the pipeline from the Russian side, and the plug caused a differential to build up until it came unstuck and flew around fucking shit up. This is an eminently reversible condition.
The unsafe condition is a large pressure differential between one end of the pipe and that is not necessarily quickly reversable. Do you know how long it takes to pressurize 200 km of 48" pipe from 10 bar to 100? I don't, but my guess based on experience working at substantially smaller but still industrial scales is that we're talking hours at a minimum.
Well from that link earlier the pipeline holds ~300 million c.m. when in storage mode -- that's indeed a couple days pumping, but:
You don't need to pump it enough to equalize the pressure completely, just enough so the plug doesn't move quite so violently -- I think this getting the plug to move is actually the goal in this kind of operation?
Related, you probably would not allow the pressure to go anywhere as low as 10 bar when your instruments are telling you it's 100 at the other end; I guess this depends on how stupid you think the Russians are, but they did build two of the things and operate the other one for quite a while without blowing it up
In 17 hours the pressure on the low side would be quite a lot higher than previously assuming somebody said "oh shit" and started the pumps again after incident 1 -- so you'd expect incident 2 to be quite a bit less destructive even if the plug did move some in the end, which does not seem to be the case.
To put some numbers around it:
The internal cross-section of the pipe is approximately 1m2, so each bar of pressure differential will push a plug with 100kN of force. That's enough to shoot 10 tons of hydrate at g-like acceleration. Sounds difficult at the best of times.
Also the plug is stuck until it isn't. When you depressurise you move back across that phase diagram until the solid sublimates, which happens radially from the outside, in. The plug is stuck until it shrinks from the walls enough to move (upon which you don't want it to move) and can be melted and cleaned up with pigging and glycol.
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