The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, in 2022, caused the emission of 465,000 tons of methane, a gas 84 times more powerful than CO2 in its contribution to climate change, on a 20-year scale, according to several studies on the leak collected in this Wednesday the magazine Nature.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were built to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea, and on September 26, 2022, they suffered underwater explosions that resulted in a large gas leak.
Several research groups have worked on the study of the leak with different scientific methodologies, and from the pooling of these investigations comes the data that consolidates the Nord Stream explosion as the most damaging to the environment in history.
Among them, the group Luis Guanter and Itziar Irakulis at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) have participated, two great world experts in measuring methane leaks through the observations offered by satellites.
The results of their satellite calculations have been complemented with other modeling, which has quantified the leak based on the capacity of the pipeline and the gas it transported; air control and data analysis from the gas measurement towers located in the coastal vicinity of where the sabotage occurred.
“Although the conditions of the satellites were complicated those days, because there were many clouds that complicated the observation of the leak through the satellites, we obtained data that allowed us to make the estimate,” Guanter explained to EFE.
The UPV researcher has highlighted that the cross-section of studies with different methodologies has confirmed that the sabotage of the Nord Stream has been the most serious specific methane leak that has occurred so far.
The 465,000 tons of methane emitted in that 2022 explosion far exceed the two most serious recent leaks: the one that occurred in Kazakhstan in 2023 (127,000 tons of methane) or in California in 2015 (97,100 tons), with the exception that “these The last two events were due to accidents,” the researcher recalled.
Climate consequences
These leaks are especially serious in the current context of climate change, since methane is a gas with a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2, but much more powerful in the short term in its contribution to warming.
Despite this, the researchers point out that the Nord Stream leak only accounted for 0.1% of methane emissions in 2022, the year in which the main source of emissions (30% of the total) was the transportation sector. fossils (mines and gas and oil extraction), followed by agriculture and livestock.
In another article collected this Wednesday in Nature Communicationsanother group of researchers collects the conclusions of their study on the extent of this methane leak in several protected ecosystems in the Baltic.
The authors point out that 14% of the Baltic Sea had methane concentrations five times higher than average levels due to the sabotage of the Nord Stream, which may have negatively impacted 23 marine protected areas in the region.
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