Wed, Feb 12 2025 12 February, 2025

Nord Stream leak twice as bad as previously thought — new study

The Nord Stream explosion resulted in the largest release of methane in history. And yet it was still a small fraction of the total methane released by the global oil and gas industry.

Dmitriy Medvedev at a ceremony marking the start of construction of Nord Stream’s underwater section (Photo: The Kremlin's Presidential Press and Information Office)

The 2022 explosion and leak of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea resulted in the release of 485,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere, according to a new study of the disaster.

The methane released from the pipeline was the largest human-caused methane emissions event in history. But the magnitude of the release is twice as bad as previously thought, according to a new study conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme and published in Nature. Prior studies estimated the methane released from the disaster at between 75,000 and 230,000 tonnes.

Methane is a super potent greenhouse gas, roughly 80 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. At the same time, methane dissipates in the atmosphere much faster than CO2, which means that cuts in methane emissions can yield much more rapid and significant climate benefits.

The Nord Stream methane release was five times larger than the previous record, the catastrophic leak of a natural gas storage site at Aliso Canyon in Los Angeles in 2015, which lasted for several months. The blowout at Aliso Canyon resulted in more than 97,000 metric tonnes of methane spewed into the atmosphere.

But the total from Nord Stream was far higher, and it was equivalent to the climate impact of driving 8 million cars for a year.

And yet, it was only a tiny fraction of human-caused methane emissions, representing 0.1 percent of methane released in 2022 from human activities.

“This release was extraordinary in its magnitude but it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Manfredi Caltagirone, the head of the UNEP-led International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO), which researches and publishes data on methane emissions.

Even within the oil and gas industry, the Nord Stream disaster was a rounding error compared to the sector’s total impact.

“Despite their massive size, the Nord Stream explosions represented just two days’ worth of the global oil and gas industry’s methane emissions,” Caltagirone said. “There is an enormous opportunity to address this pollution, which is supercharging the climate crisis.”

The study, coordinated by the UNEP IMEO programme, included nearly 70 scientists from 30 research organisations.

The Global Methane Partnership, an international effort agreed to in 2021, aims to cut methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

But despite country-level pledges, some of them ambitious, the world is far off track. Methane emissions continue to rise and are now rising faster than at any point since the 1980s.

Satellite technology continues to improve, increasing the monitoring of methane sources. But even with improved monitoring, action from the oil and gas industry remains inadequate.

Late last year, UN experts told COP29 attendees that the IMEO programme had detected over 1,200 major emissions events, and notified governments and companies involved, but only received responses about action taken in only 1 percent of those cases.

In the U.S., the oil and gas industry is the largest source of methane emissions, accounting for over 40 percent of the total. The incoming Trump administration has pledged to roll back regulations on methane and promote the expansion of the LNG industry, which would exacerbate methane emissions.

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