Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart; Inspectors have discovered suspected sabotage, someone apparently drilled 1cm holes in the pipeline.
German prosecutors launch probe into suspected sabotage of LNG pipeline
The investigation comes as Germany seeks to increase its LNG import capacity.
BY LAURA HÜLSEMANN
JANUARY 5, 2024 7:00 PM CETGerman federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into a suspected case of sabotage after small holes were found in a liquefied natural gas pipeline under construction in the north of Germany.
Prosecutors have taken over an “investigation into the initial suspicion of anti-constitutional sabotage,” a spokeswoman for the Federal Public Prosecutor General told German public broadcaster NDR.
…
Read more (German): https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-suspected-sabotage-lng-pipeline-germany-gasunie/
Drilling multiple holes through such a pipeline shows a fair degree of determination, normally the walls of such pipelines are over an inch thick. Drilling such holes with retail hand tools would probably take at least 20 minutes each of very noisy drilling. While it is not impossible this was a lone wolf attack, in my opinion it seems more likely multiple people were involved.
There is a substantial list of potential suspects.
Last Generation Climate Extremists have performed multiple high profile sabotage attacks against private jets and yachts, as well as the usual activist vandalism of priceless works of art, but they normally do this for publicity. So a secret vandalism attack seems a bit outside their normal pattern of behaviour.
Russia is a potential suspect – the new pipeline is intended to help Germany distribute gas imported by ship, which would further weaken any remaining leverage Russia has over Germany.
Even Ukraine might have a motive for attacking the pipe. Last November Dutch Intelligence accused a Ukrainian military officer of conducting the Nord Stream undersea pipeline attack, under orders from Ukraine. While it might seem counterintuitive that Ukraine would want Germany to be more dependent on Russian gas, Ukraine’s actions might be motivated by ensuring the only Russian gas which can potentially reach Europe has to travel via Ukraine.
How can Germany improve their energy security, in the face of a determined and ongoing sabotage campaign?
A few weeks ago Germany inked a huge deal with Norway to replace the gas they used to import from Russia with Norwegian gas, but someone out there seems determined to manipulate availability of German energy supplies, so it is an open question whether Germany will be able to take advantage of their new Norwegian gas deal.
Frankly I think it’s time Germany considered switching back to coal. While coal can be sabotaged, a coal depot would surely be easier to defend than a long gas pipeline, especially if the coal plant is colocated with the coal mine.
Nuclear plants are also defensible, that big containment dome would take a lot of punishment before it failed. Though some components of nuclear plants such as the cooling system would be difficult to harden against a determined attack.
The electrical distribution network is also hard to defend, as South Africa has discovered. Metal thieves in South Africa have taken to removing just the reinforcing struts from power pylons, leaving the pylons themselves standing. This allows the thieves hours or days to escape and cover their tracks, before the pylons finally fall.
Strangely Germany’s solar and wind facilities haven’t been attacked, but I guess there is no point attacking energy systems which already fail to deliver.
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Most likely Wind and Solar facilities haven’t been attacked because they contain nothing of value…beyond the subsidy farmed from them
Are they not also sabotaging their OWN use of NG? Anarchists will use any excuse to destroy society. I bet they use FF every day of their lives.
Speaking as someone with lots of heavy duty hand tool experience (dairy farm repairs) this has to have been professionals with professional tools. 1cm is VERY large in terms of the force required to punch a tungsten carbide tipped drill bit through an inch of pipeline quality steel. No way a person’s full body weight would suffice. Would require a special industrial ‘drill press’ rig clamped onto the pipe, powered by a biggish portable generator So carefully planned.
I knew from the gitgo at the farm what I could probably do and what I had to take to a shop with suitable tooling. The ‘I tried but failed’ sessions were life lessons.
Police should be able to trace the sabotage tooling. Isn’t available at Home Depot.
I have a lifetime of “farmerizing” own a quality machine shop with a formal education
at a trade school in machining/welding. If I were looking to punch a hole in a natural
gas pipeline with limited tooling I would likely start with a small diameter pilot
continued..==pilot hole, then step up with whatever size by increments.
Google “cordless magnetic base drill press” Milwaukee has several
that would work well and would be my first choice.
Half an hour, tops, per hole. you can buy the stuff online from alibaba or ebay. Impossible to trace. The tools are common and not that specialised. I could probably burn a bigger messier hole with an arc welder in less than the time it takes to drill.
It’s just nuisance value from the perpetrators.
Natural gas transmission line is not hardened, just seamless very machinable
welding without flaws is where the skill level is. I could probably do
a hole by hand with a cordless drill, start with a center drill then 1/8″
pilot then whatever size desired in steps. Lots of cutting fluid and watch the chips..
Seems to be an incredibly STUPID and dangerous thing to do if there is gas in pipe.
It was under construction. No gas.
They could fill them with pressurized gas odorizer so the perps get a waft of something that may scare them
The line in this story is under construction eg empty.
Sabotaging gas lines
has been going on for a long time. Our local utility back in the early
’80’s hired a non-union company to build a several hundred mile
transmission line. The union boys took offense to that and put many
holes in the pipe among other misdeeds before it was built.
It was a disaster and led to the
utility’s failure. One nearby rancher close to me was a Texas oil and
gas mogul and I contacted him at a later time when a branch of that
line was built next to and across my property to get some understanding
of the possible issues related to that situation. One of the worst possible
things to occur is if a contractor with a excavator damages the line and breaches it.
The line on my property is licensed at around 1500psi and this time
of the year runs at about 750psi.
A high pressure leak that creates a gas cloud that
then ignites can become what is call in the parlance of the oil and gas
world a “propagating wave explosion” in which the entire pipeline
however many miles long explodes, not like a firecracker but like
a charge of high explosives..eg a high order explosion.. the gulf war in Iraq has many instances of that occurring.
Knowing almost nothing about such tools- I do recall once I need to drill into something and couldn’t do it with a typical home drill- and found a neighbor who had a drill that is like a jack hammer- it “hammers” while drilling- and easily went through whatever it was- which I can’t remember- can’t remember what you call such a drill.
You practically named it – it’s called a hammer drill. I have one I use for concrete.
“Should be able to trace the sabotage tooling”
“Should” is the operative word. Because, will they?
Annular carbide drill bit, coolant, magnetic drill. A few minutes per hole with a suitcase generator for power; I’ve recently done it through 1″ structural (not mild) steel plate to build a post hole spike to go on a vibrating packer on an excavator. Those bits are amazingly fast because they have to shear so little metal compared to a twist bit. A bit of pre-work modifying the base of the drill to fit the pipe curvature.
Everything available at Princess Auto, well under C$1,500 total.
A pickup truck with a good sized generator, to power the industrial drill and the big magnetic clamp anchors, could do it with a couple of skilled technicians.
Actually, not that hard. Gas pipe is no big deal.
Mag base drill motors are common – for plate plate. For cylindrical? I would think so given how well these drills work.
Rud,
you would not use a conventional drill but a hole cutter which has a hollow centre, and the best tool is a magnetic drill which is regularly used in steel erection using such hollow cutters. Magnetic drills have a hand feed just as bench or pillar drills have so no great force required.
“How to blow up a pipeline” by Andreas Malm.
First they started deflating SUV tyres, filling holes in golf courses with concrete, throwing paint and breaking windows. Then in June 2022 ‘Pipebusters’ cut through several uninstalled pipes and damaged a construction vehicle after breaking into a pipeline construction site. They had carefully selected all the tools they needed for the work, enough people to do it in one night and knew the layout of the site – a well planned act of sabotage. And then there’s this well planned act of sabotage. Not sure you need to look at Russia or Ukraine – they both favour the large explosions method.
And in February/March 2023 small holes ‘about a penny wide’ were found drilled into pipes in the Coastal Gas Link in British Columbia; an anonymous poster claimed they had sabotaged the pipeline in 10 locations along the pipeline. Sound familiar?
Nuclear reactors are hardened when they are “colocated” as power sources of military vessels.
September 14, 2017
Hamilton police are asking the public to report any suspicious activity around the construction of a new section of the Enbridge Line 10 oil pipeline after it was vandalized twice in Ancaster in the past week.
Amid fierce opposition from critics who argue it is increasing its capacity to send oil south of the border, Enbridge is replacing a 35-kilometre section of the pipeline between Westover in Flamborough and Nanticoke.
An anonymous poster on the website anarchistnews.org appears to take credit for the vandalism, declaring “pipelines are war” and claiming to be acting “in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of this area.”
“It’s in this spirit that we found ourselves going for long moonlit strolls through the trenches of the freshly dug line 10 right-of-way,” the post states.
“We found ourselves going for long moonlit strolls through the trenches of the freshly dug Line 10 right of way,” said the email, which described pipelines as indefensible.
“Whenever we felt the urge, we drilled various sized holes into pipeline segments while spilling corrosives inside others.”
How-to guide includes cutting oil
The email also described how to tamper with the pipeline.
“You’ll need 1. A decent cordless drill, 2. A good smaller gauge cobalt and titanium drill bit – preferably with a pilot point, and 3. Cutting oil. (Oh, the irony!)” the email reads.
“With a righteous sense of adventure, prove your steal ninja skills by getting into the right of way. Once you’re in there, you’re pretty invisible from the road.”
In the email, the group described pipelines as war and an affront to Indigenous people. Such projects, it says, are “perfect opportunities for effective direct action that harms nothing but an oil company’s bottom line.”
They’re passing methods, ideas and tactics between groups and escalating the sabotage; they may see it as a bit of fun but this will not stop here. How long before somebody is injured, or worse, or before they take it too far?
Hopefully any injuries will be to the sabateurs.
Liquid Natural Gas pipeline? Strange .. temperature of MINUS 260F required. The headline is correct, it is just a natural gas pipeline.
Nailed it – the entire world is now Full of Stupid.
We will extinguish ourselves, nothing else can possibly happen
“Liquid Natural Gas pipeline? Strange .. temperature of MINUS 260F required.”
That would only be true for liquid NG (primarily methane) at seal-level pressure. Methane’s critical pressure is 46 atmospheres, or 676 psia.
As posted above by Mr Ed:
“The line on my property is licensed at around 1500psi and this time of the year runs at about 750psi.”
Methane’s critical temperature is -116 °F, so for pressures above 676 psia, temperatures lower than this would make methane a compressible liquid and for temperatures higher than this the methane would be classified as a supercritical fluid, not as a “gas”.
PV=nRT
A nuclear power plant has very high power density, and substantial security. Far less susceptible to outside interference. They, (and the rest of us) should use nuclear for the base load. Natural gas should be reserved for the variable fluctuations in load.
My concern is the cooling system has to be high surface area, so it requires special measures to protect such installations with heavy armour. Hamas has demonstrated simple scaled up sugar rockets can inflict substantial damage at range, so just patrolling a few miles in the vicinity of a plant might not be enough. If German extremists start using such rockets it would take time to harden targets against such attacks.
Would a molten salt reactor, prove more resilient?
Like SMRs, you can’t attack what only exists as a powerpoint presentation.
India would not agree
Excluding, of course, verbal attacks that point our stupidity in such presentations.
These pipes are moderate strength steel with relatively thin walls. The in-range stock at Mannesmann H2 ready pipe goes to DN508 with 8.74mm wall. It seems the 55km pipeline is DN600 so maybe 10mm wall thickness.
A magnetic base cordless drill from a tool hire shop would cost peanuts for a weekend hire (deposit maybe more than peanuts but you get that back on return). Would take less than a minute for each hole. Just don’t tell the rental place what you intend to do. And don’t ask if the drill will go through gas piping.
These drills are well geared and it would be best to use cutting fluid so very little noise. Steel being drilled with adequate bit force, firmly held, is not noisy.
Attached is Kennards in Australia but I am certain there are still similar tool rental places in Germany.
They ran some pipe like that near here about 15 years ago, 3 feet diameter, half inch thick, the guy said it held 3000 psi typically.
A centimetre is a pin prick, ⅜ of an inch.
Use the little ‘diamond’ (annular) drill bits that arty crafty folks would use for drilling holes in glass with plain water as your cutting fluid. Get a set of 6 (all different sizes) for well less than £10 from eBay
It would be easy going, the steel would by definition be soft steel so that it can flex and bend with variations in air & ground temperature (climate change by any other words haha)
Not noisy at all.
Hire really large sizes (up to 6 inches or more) of those bits for drilling reinforced concrete or as builders do, for installing the umbilicals used by many air-con systems.
These peeps were kids and amateur
The Real Fun would start if those holes were used to inject Oxygen – say from the steel bottles/cylinders as used in workshops, garages, ambulances and hospitals even.
Not dissimilar to how folks inject bottled Propane gas into Gopher burrows in their own back yards, wait a minute or two, then ignite it.
Boom.
Green activists? Russians? How about green activists hired by Russians, trained and equipped by Russians.
How about the Reds under the beds? Or the North Koreans? Or, or aliens firing frickin’ laser beams? sarc (obviously)
Dismissal is not refutation. Both Russia and radical greens have a a material interest in sabotaging natural gas supplies in Germany.
There were communists in the US Government in the 1940s and they did conduct espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, the Russian government of that time. “The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America – The Stalin Era” by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (2000)
The Vice President of the United States from 1941 to 1945, Henry Wallace, was, at least a Soviet sympathizer. https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-world-that-wasnt-review-when-fdr-dumped-wallace-9f93bb24
There were reds under the bed.
The Soviet Union did finance and train the German terrorist Red Army Faction (a/k/a the Baader-Meinhof gang) who assassinated more than 30 people in West Germany in the 1970s.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before resigning in 1991. He was apparently involved in KGB coordination and support for the Red Army faction.
Putin’s regime is centered on the Siloviki (strongmen) who were his KGB colleagues in those days and who now are his most trusted colleagues.
Would a Russian regime sponsor terrorists acting in Germany? It has happened before. there is no reason to believe that it will not happen again.
Walter, I have no doubt that Russia has financed anti-fracking and environmental activist groups through a network of Russian oligarch’s and middle-men. However there is zero evidence that Russia is directly recruiting these activists for sabotage at this level. In fact, given the nature of this sabotage and the fact that it has occurred in the UK, Canada and Germany, I think it’s highly likely the activist groups are doing it themselves. If Russia recruits and trains people to do sabotage then they tend to supply explosives and guns, and tend to use highly visible and loud explosive methods – that is their way, not drilling a few holes in the pipes. In this case I think you are looking in entirely the wrong direction.
Russians? Really. Hell why not blame it on Hitler and Trump too. Maybe it was an insurrectionist who couldn’t make it to the usa capital on January 6th. Oh, wait, how’s about white supremacy racists antisemite. Stupid.
Yes Russians. See above.
I bet none of the drillers believed in science.
Is there a variety of shoe-throwing that is pro-constitutional, or is it anti-constitutional because it was a French word?
Seems like a 1mm hole would be simple to repair for the level of expertise that they must have in pipeline assembly, and they’ve obviously got a way to inspect the pipe because they found the problem. Seems like if the pipe was incorporated into a system it would fail pre-startup testing.
Could it be that some supplier imagined that they’d get the contract for rework? That would be real sabotage, as in workers getting paid more to fix the product that they’d damaged.
Maybe they were brave enough to use explosive downhole perforators which are regularly used to perforate production tubing
Didn’t realise it was under construction so explosive charge unlikely
You won’t like the answer to that.
I won’t like YOUR answer to that, just like I wouldn’t like a misguided left-wing authoritarian answer to the same question either.
Benny
I wouldn’t be surprised if climate activists were behind these acts. Inspired by the book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” by Andreas Malm, the well-known Swedish (obviously deranged) “human ecologist” and member of the Swedish Trotskyist “Socialist Party”. Our German long-distance greenhorn and spokesperson for Fridays for Future Germany, Luisa Neubauer, also philosophized about bomb attacks in interviews: “And of course we’re thinking about how to blow up a pipeline (the largest crude oil pipeline in the world)”.
German climate activist Tadzio Müller, son of a Brazilian woman and a German lawyer, also advocates sabotage: “Destroying these pipelines is actually our damn duty.” Such radical actions are legitimate and “self-defense”. “Germany, we have to talk. Germany, you are an amoral filthy swine”
People who think and talk like that can be trusted to do anything.
le·git·i·mate adjective /ləˈjidəmət/
I think word misuse is defended too often.
From the above article:
“Prosecutors have taken over an ‘investigation into the initial suspicion of anti-constitutional sabotage,’ a spokeswoman for the Federal Public Prosecutor General told German public broadcaster NDR.”
I’m just wondering if the Federal Public Prosecutor General considers constitutional sabotage worth prosecution?
It’s a legal format, referring to Section 88 of the German Criminal Code.
From the above article:
“Inspectors have discovered suspected sabotage, someone apparently drilled 1cm holes in the pipeline”
First clue as to suspected party/parties: use of the metric system for purchasing drill bits.
A battery operated drill. Some spare batteries. A good set of drills and some cutting fluid. 1 or 2 people. Biggest danger is the LNG. Probably dangerously cold at a pressure that could cut through skin. Safety gear required.