Maggie's Farm

I doubt that the present trans-mania will ever become the mega industry that article would like us to believe.

Is it too soon to assert that parents and medical professionals that undertake gender re-assignment with passionate interest are indulging in a form of Munchausen-by-Proxy Pedophelia? The sooner the behavior has a name, the sooner it can be brought out into the sunlight and addressed.

But I don't think it can last. Fads have a trajectory, and this one has every appearance of being on one. No adult with reasonably sound mental health is going to trot out their kid for sacrifice with the foreknowledge that they'll never be seeing any grandkids as a result. People are stupid, but not enough of them are that stupid.

I'll try to provide some constructive counterpoint to this, hopefully a little useful insight:

A compressor station, by definition, is a Hazardous Production Facility. It's a classification. That's why there are signs on the gates. There are hazards inside and access is controlled, limited to people familiar with them.

As far as I know, both of the pipelines were shut in at the time of the ruptures, i.e. not moving any gas, because of the sanctions. Why would the consortium be running their compressors if the pipelines were shut in? For what purpose? It's shut in. It's normal to keep the pipelines fully packed at operating pressure when they are shut in. And by the way, compressors are high-maintenance items, which is why there are usually double or triple redundancies at the plant.

Why would the consortium be running poisonous, corrosive gases through the pipeline in the first place, when H2S is the first thing that is scrubbed from a gas supply, for exactly those reasons? They would be scrubbing H2O, H2S, CO2, ethanes, propanes, butanes and every other gas fraction, as an impurity - because they don't want a liquid fraction in their Natural Gas (methane) gas stream. Because that would cause a problem. It would require more frequent pigging, for example. Many of these impurities are mostly stripped out at the wellhead / site production facility, and there would be a final treater at the compressor site to get the supply into the required composition / specification, before compression.

(Sorry, wouldn't take the whole thing)

As for the gas 'sitting there for months', that's a 'so-what?' question. It is routine, and one of the reasons that pipeline companies take such pains to purify their gas streams in the first place. The LawDog's unfamiliarity with basic pipeline operational engineering is leading him to believe that everything is an alarming crisis, because he's ignorant of what is normal. And he, for some reason, appears to believe that incompetent, under-funded, vodka-soaked Russians are in charge of operations. Has he provided any evidence of anything yet?

The pipelines are owned and managed by a Swiss consortium. They cost a fortune. The Swiss are not renowned for cutting corners. The lines are managed under ISO (European) and DNV (Norwegian) certifications, and those are not casual standards, I can tell you from direct, extensive personal experience in the drilling world. They are a major P.I.T.A. for systematic compliance-checking. It is a system of tight controls with third-party verification, and the third parties are accredited and certified, and audited.

The notion that a pipeline has corroded itself into junk 3 years after being commissioned is ludicrous, under the circumstances.

I've been involved with quite a few pipeline projects as the drilling function, I've had to move my anchored drilling rig out of the way for pipelay vessels to come through, dropping a finished pipeline end that our well-in-progress would ultimately connect to - in fact one of those occasions was with the Solitaire, which worked on the Nordstream2 project:

https://allseas.com/equipment/solitaire/

..and as a driller, it's normal for me to be closely working with production people and their facilities. What we do is very highly specialized, some of it jaw-dropping to people when they see it and start to get into the details for the first time. Billion-dollar projects with life cycles into the decades have a way of demanding rigorous attention to detail, demands for proof and people who actually check your work before proceeding. It's not optional.

Just my own uninformed two cents of course. Right now the Swiss consortium cannot get access because the Swedish and Danish navies are in control of the locations and won't issue a permit until they're done with their own investigation. It will be very interesting to see how this incident transpired.

The Swedes have announced evidence of explosions and therefore, gross sabotage.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-russia-not-invited-nord-stream-investigation-2022-10-06/