Maggie's Farm

I would put some Pinocchios on that one, I think. It is possible to have defects in manufacturing processes. But it's highly unlikely. Since Russia doesn't have the capability to lay pipelines, they would have contracted the pipelay from western services. When the steel is formed at the mill, it's inspected, each and every foot, and pieces of it are tested to destruction to determine true ultimate strength. These pipelines would have been about 1.5" thick, from what I've read, and they're concrete coated (to keep them from floating). The pipelay ship is an assembly line, where sections are moved from the hull to the center line of the ship and added to the pipeline as it is laid our the back. As each section of pipe is welded on the pipelay ship, they inspect the welds right there on board, using multiple methods to ensure the welds are flawless. Usually the welding itself is computer-controlled. Then after it's in place, the whole pipeline would have been inspected from the inside, end-to-end using an intelligent pig, before commissioning it. In summary, the whole enterprise is so expensive (10's of billions $), they wouldn't fail to inspect it thoroughly. Right now about $350 million worth of inventory is boiling out of the breaches.

Destruction of the line is almost certainly at the hand of man, and in my view, probably remotely done after a waiting period to escape the obvious surveillance connections. But a US Navy ship was within 30 klicks of the pipeline some weeks ago, and it just happened to have a contingent of Special Ops on board, and several of its helicopters made passes over the pipeline location, coincidentally where the breaches are now bubbling away. If true, it was an extremely reckless act, an act of war by any definition, take your choice: War on the EU, who will suffer from loss of supply for at least one winter, and war on Russia. The idea that is circulating, that Russia did it themselves is absurd. How many of their own warships have they intentionally sunk, then? Losing the lines costs too much to remedy and removes too many negotiating options and diplomatic & strategic advantages for it to have ever been self-inflicted.

That would mean that the pipeline is in conditions of temperature and pressure that would put it into the phase envelope of gas hydrate formation. Is it? I am betting, 'no'. Plus, a hydrate plug, or any plug in general, would not induce conditions for over-pressure burst nor failure from fluid hammering. I read the article and the guy is just running his imagination to extremely unlikely things. Pipelines like all petroleum infrastructure, are built with safety factors that are in multiples of expected conditions. Plus, the pipelines (I and II) haven't been down there long enough to be having maintenance issues like corrosion. When stacked against the probability they were blown up for strategic reasons, the 'natural causes' scenarios are probabalistically, vanishingly small. Not a pipeline engineer, but have managed closely around pipeline projects before as a driller, and just my two cents. I think Biden blew them up. Our NATO allies are facing a rough winter and economic strangulation because of it, and don't think they don't know it.

You're right about it all being conjecture. But, as I mentioned the US Navy had a ship in the nearby vicinity about a month ago. The depths (80m) are well within the reach of saturation divers, but more importantly, surveillance of this region, however busy, is limited by satellites and undersea transponders for noise. Explosive charges can be laid by autonomous undersea drones - they now use them commercially for subsea survey and reconnaissance work, and the military's capabilities are far greater. Lay charges.....wait for a few weeks...detonate either remotely or automatically, as timed. Presto!

First, bear in mind that a 'bend' in the pipe is probably not something you could sense if you were standing at that point, looking either way - it's a gentle curve that allows all of the machinery that's routinely put inside the pipe to pass without any chance of hanging up. The comparison would be to rail line bends. Even when pipelines come to surface, say when they transition to the riser at an offshore platform, the bend radii are very gentle. The pig trains that they launch into these things can be made up of devices that are 10 ft +, and the last thing they want to risk is getting stuck.

Other reasons for the location, not knowing the topography: Damage at a bend will complicate repair - again, I'm not a pipeline engineer, but I think it's likely they'll have to lift the pipeline to surface to work on it, meaning it will be cut and then re-fitted with a new spool piece to re-connect it at the seabed. A mess - but the longer it goes without any insights being gained on the cause, the more likely it's a mission and not 'natural causes'. They've already had plenty of time to get an ROV down there to look at it..

This is a useful site if you haven't seen it before. The 3 'Danger Areas' are little red circles - hover your mouse over each item to see the description / vessel name.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:17.4/centery:55.3/zoom:8

You'll notice on Marine Traffic that this vessel is steaming quite slowly just to the northeast of the Swedish warships, having left Copenhagen a few days ago.

https://n-o-s.eu/the-fleet/new-r-v-skagerak/

The SKAGERAK is a Swedish survey vessel with ROV capabilities.

She has a multibeam and echo profilers and this will return with almost photographic images of the seabed and fairly detailed images of the pipeline as well, bird's eye view. I've picked up old wrecks on the seabed in quite good detail using a vessel like this to finalize drilling locations. The acoustic doppler current profiler will allow them to read the currents real time from top - to- bottom of the water column (the currents will displace the plume from directly above the breach).

The boom at the stern pivots up and over to launch an ROV spread. A Remote Operated Vehicle would allow them to stand off at a safe distance at surface but get right to the breach with the ROV - ROVs are operated on a spooled tether that provides power and communications, telemetry, so on, and in this modern deepwater age, they are typically configured for 10,000 ft. An ROV will allow them to get right up to the breaches - they have great cameras, lots of power, lighting, so forth - it'll just depend on the water visibility, but even then, they have sonar. But 10,000 ft of spool in 80m of water depth allows the vessel to keep a nice safe upwind distance from the surface plume.