Though methane leaking from the yet unexplained damage to the Nord Stream pipelines is likely to dump an unprecedented amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, some experts see it as a drop in the bucket after reviewing data released by the Danish Energy Agency, which allowed experts to produce preliminary estimates of methane leakage.
“It’s not trivial, but it’s a modest-sized US city, something like that,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University. “There are so many sources all around the world. Any single event tends to be small. I think this tends to fall in that category.”
The leak isn’t likely to affect marine life in the way an oil leak might, despite its size, according to Jasmin Cooper, a research associate at the Sustainable Gas Institute. “The environmental impact will be toward global warming.”
The environmental group EDP’s calculation doubles that of the Aliso Canyon Disaster, with chemical engineer Andrew Baxter saying “just one of the pipelines could release emissions equalling the annual emissions of two million cars.”
A researcher with the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France preferred a wider perspective, comparing the projected emissions to the 250 million cars operating in the European Union alone.
However, some scientists caution against underestimating the potential impacts of the leak, which echoes the worst-case scenario projections compiled by the Danish government –778 million cubic liters, veering from more conservative estimates.
29 September 2022, 14:42 GMT
Paul Balcombe, a faculty member in the chemical engineering department at Imperial College London, warns that “the effects of the leak are still coming into focus,” and that “[the leak] would have a very large environmental and climate impact indeed – even if it released a fraction of this.”
Due to safety concerns, access to the site is limited. Danish officials said on Wednesday that both pipelines, which have already released more than half of their gas, could be empty by Sunday, at which point scientists, security officials, and forensic scientists will have better access.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said earlier Thursday that the incident looks like a terrorist attack on a state level. "It is very difficult to imagine that such a terrorist act could take place without the involvement of some state,” he said at the time. According to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, Moscow is “ready to consider requests from EU countries for a joint investigation.”