Europe has claimed that the explosion were a deliberate move to ‘sabotage’ by Russia with connection to the ongoing war between Moscow and Ukraine. The pipeline shows three major gas leaks on the pipelines that connect Russia to Germany. The leaks have given rise to concern over Europe's dependency on Russian oil.
It is to be noted that the pipelines were not in use owing to the war between Ukraine and Russia. How veer, scientists are clamoring to figure out how much of the residual methane gas did get released in to the environment.
For the uninitiated, the methane gas can cause grave damage to the Ozone layer in the environment. While the Nord Stream 1 pipelines were halted, and Nordstream 2 had never even started -- they all contained pressurized natural gas, the vast majority of which is methane.
The expulsion of methane, comes amid growing public consciousness of its effects on the climate. At the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, over 100 countries pledged to drastically curb emissions.
Why is Methane leak harmful?
According to Bloomberg report, Greenpeace’s European Union unit put the figure to potentially as much as 30 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. If those estimates are close to being accurate, it would be one of the biggest methane leaks ever.
Notably, if the entire stock of natural gas escapes into the environment, it will result in around 200,000 tonnes of methane emissions. Experts estimate that such an amount will have about the same global warming potential over a 100-year timeframe as about 6 million tons of carbon dioxide.
Methane leak from Nord stream- Environment impact
Methane is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes 1 million premature deaths every year. Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas. Over a 20-year period, it is 80 times more potent at warming than carbon dioxide.
“The most direct effect of these gas leaks on climate is the extra dollop of the powerful greenhouse gas methane," said Bloomberg quoted Dave Reay, executive director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute. “That said, this is a wee bubble in the ocean compared to the huge amounts of so-called ‘fugitive methane’ that are emitted every day around the world due to things like fracking, coal mining and oil extraction."
While methane leaks are harmful to the climate, they do not pose a significant threat to the marine environment, the German Environment Ministry said.
