Gas pipeline: Nord Stream leaks released half a million tons of methane

Gas pipeline: Nord Stream leaks released half a million tons of methane

Gas pipeline
Nord Stream leaks released half a million tons of methane






On September 26, 2022, several explosions caused leaks on the Nord Stream pipelines. Large amounts of harmful methane were released. An analysis now shows how much it really was.

According to an international study, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines at the end of September 2022 resulted in up to half a million tons of methane being released into the atmosphere. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne said this was the largest amount of the greenhouse gas methane released in a single event to date.

This was the result of an analysis by the International Observatory for Methane Emissions (IMEO) of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Next to carbon dioxide (CO2), methane is considered the most harmful greenhouse gas. According to estimates, it contributed to around 30 percent of global warming.

The results of the analysis appeared in three studies simultaneously in the specialist publications “Nature” and “Nature Communications”. The DLR, together with the Technical University of Braunschweig, took part in the study with a flight measurement campaign on the leaks.

The proportion of the total annual methane emissions caused by humans was therefore relatively small. The total amount of 445,000 to 485,000 tons of methane released from the Nord Stream pipeline leaks represents 0.1 percent of man-made methane emissions for 2022, according to the UN Environment Program.

Some of the methane did not rise directly

The flight measurements at the beginning of October 2022 showed large-scale leaks of methane dissolved in seawater, it was said. Accordingly, some of the methane did not rise directly, but first dissolved in the water.

“Nine days after the damage to the pipelines, we found large amounts of methane in the air around the leaks up to 45 kilometers away,” explained Friedemann Reum from the DLR Institute of Atmospheric Physics. “At this point, the pipes had already emptied and the methane from them had actually blown away.”

But the data from October 5, 2022 showed that 19 to 48 tons of methane were still being emitted every hour. It was methane that had initially dissolved in the water at the leak points. It was then transported further by the ocean currents before it got into the air.

At the end of September 2022, the two gas pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2, which run from Russia to Germany, were damaged by several explosions. The gas escaping from the pipeline formed a carpet of bubbles about 900 meters wide on the water surface, and measurements then showed increased methane levels in the atmosphere.

dpa

Source: Stern

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