HomeScience & TechClimate change Focus: Researchers calculate  greenhouse gas emissions resulting from mysterious leaks...

Climate change Focus: Researchers calculate  greenhouse gas emissions resulting from mysterious leaks from gas pipelines that connect Russia to Europe

Since September 26, the Nord Stream undersea gas pipeline – which runs from Russia to Germany – has been experiencing mysterious leaks near the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. With the tense energy situation between Russia and the West following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a real geopolitical battle has erupted, with NATO now among those attributing the leaks to sabotage. Seismologists have obtained data that could help determine the cause of the leaks, and other researchers are trying to determine how much methane — a powerful greenhouse gas is released as a result.

Overnight on September 26, operators of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline experienced a sudden drop in pressure from 105 bars (which is 105 times atmospheric pressure) to just 7 bars. Soon after, a 1-kilometer-wide area of ​​the Baltic Sea’s surface was bubbling with leaking gas. The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is currently not operational and its certification process was halted after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. But it is still full of gas, which is believed to contain around 90% methane.

 The drop in pressure prompted seismologists to take a closer look at their data, says Björn Lund of Uppsala University in Sweden. Attention to seismological data required an extraordinary week. “I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Lund says, adding that his network detected seismic activity at the same time as the leak, which is consistent with explosions, not earthquakes  which have a different seismic signature.

Climate community on alert

The events also put the climate community on alert. When Andrew Baxter, once an engineer in the oil and gas industry and now director of energy transition at the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund, heard about the Nord Stream 2 leak, he “switched back into engineering mode” to try to quantify the resulting methane leak. “I came up with a very rough estimate, there are so many variables and unknowns that it’s very difficult to say definitively how much methane has gone into the atmosphere,” he says.

Baxter estimates that 115,000 tons of methane were likely released during the initial sudden pressure drop in Nord Stream 2, based on the pipe’s dimensions and water temperature. Per unit mass, methane has a much stronger greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide—especially in the short term. Baxter says the total impact of this spill is equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of two million cars.

“If these numbers are ultimately confirmed, it would be one of the largest single releases of natural gas in history from a single location,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that analyzes data. California. But he adds that this does not fundamentally change the size of global emissions. The event, while huge, accounts for about 0.14% of global annual methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, says Mark Davis, chief executive of Capterio, a London-based company that tracks but has not detected gas flares from industry.

 Released gas because it does not burn. They claim that once the leak was discovered, igniting it could have mitigated much of the damage by converting the methane into carbon dioxide. Since the initial pressure drop in Nord Stream 2, leaks have also been reported in the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline that runs alongside it and is also currently out of service.

Measure atmospheric methane levels

Accurately measuring the amount of methane released will take some time. Efforts to date have been hampered by the vagaries of geography and bad luck. The public satellites that environmental observations rely on weren’t pointing in the right direction at the time, says Itziar Irakulis-Loitxate of Valencia Polytechnic University in Spain, who uses satellite data to measure atmospheric methane levels. And the cloud cover common in northern latitudes meant it was almost impossible to get any data.

This is the main challenge in monitoring methane over water: water absorbs most of the sunlight and masks any signal from methane in the spectrometer. The increase in methane has been detected from the ground by at least one observatory: the Swedish station of the European Integrated Carbon Observation System project at Hyltemoss.

In the coming days and weeks, scientists will continue to try to understand how much methane was released as a result of the leaks. Seismologists could also help determine how the pipeline ruptured. By comparing the seismic data they collected on the Nord Stream explosions with those from previous marine explosions, Lund and his team already suspect TNT. Lund and his colleagues are trying to figure out exactly how many explosions occurred from their seismic data, but he notes that the complex geology of the Earth’s crust in the area between Denmark and Sweden makes that difficult. “There is a very large change in the crustal thickness of the rock material,” he says.

For more read: Katharine Sanderson, What do Nord Stream methane leaks mean for climate change?, Nature News (2022),https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03111-x 

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