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Gas leaks from the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines released around 70,000 tons of methane, a major greenhouse gas, according to estimates by French researchers based on atmospheric observations published today.
“These are important figures, equivalent to 2% of France’s emissions or the emissions of a city like Paris over the course of a year,” Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA), said in French. acronym Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences.
The researcher, quoted by AFP, considered that this “is not good news, but it is not a climate bomb either.” The estimates are, even so, lower than those initially advanced by specialists and Non-Governmental Organizations, in the days after the explosions in the gas pipelines, on September 26, and which were based on estimates of the quantities of gas they contained.
At that time, projections pointed to the release of around 300,000 tons of natural gas (which is methane).
The CEA researchers, for their part, based their simulation on the readings of the stations of the European ICOS observation network, which monitors the fluxes of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The readings at the stations that monitor methane emissions were modeled taking into account about 10,000 scenarios.
With the winds, the emissions moved first to the south of Sweden, then turned west, passing Norway and the United Kingdom, before being detected, in smaller amounts, at the tip of Brittany.
During a video conference, Philippe Ceais admitted that the results surprised him and his colleagues. “Was there less gas in the pipes? Did some of the methane dissolve in the water, which doesn’t seem very likely? We don’t have an explanation”, he acknowledged, emphasizing “that as the ‘tube’ empties, the pressure drops”, which may have influenced the amounts of gas released.
Source: Observadora
