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As soon as investigators can safely get arms on, the tough work of triaging the issues and discovering options begins. “You assess: ‘Okay, what’s the state of the pipe? What are the damages?’” says Jean-François Ribet of the Monaco-based oil and fuel pipeline restore firm 3X Engineering, which has beforehand repaired pipelines in Yemen which have been sabotaged by the likes of Al-Qaeda. That evaluation will be performed utilizing an inspection robotic, a remotely operated car, or specialised divers.
Sending divers to the location is difficult due to the depth of the pipeline: whereas the identified leaks are concentrated in comparatively shallow waters—round 50 meters deep—nearly all of the pipeline lies 80 to 100 meters underwater. And all of it should must be inspected for potential injury.
“We’ve performed repairs at that depth, however it’s a must to use saturation diving,” says Olivier Marin, R&D and technical supervisor at 3X Engineering. (In saturation diving, which is used for deep-sea situations, divers stay on the excessive depth in a specialised habitat and bear a single decompression as soon as the operation is over.) “You’ll be able to perhaps do 10 hours, however you’ll have to keep for one month in a hyperbaric chamber,” he says.
The repairs themselves wouldn’t be straightforward. There are a variety of choices, says Ribet. The primary is to switch the broken sections of the pipe of their totality—although that’s the most costly. “You want the identical diameter, the identical type of metal grade, and so forth,” he says. And you want to carry shipborne cranes which can be sturdy sufficient to carry the heavy pipe segments out of the water.
The second restore choice can be to put in a clamp that covers the broken sections of the pipe, primarily patching the ruptured areas. Nevertheless, with an inside diameter of 1.153 meters, the Nord Stream pipelines would require enormous clamps, in addition to the momentary set up of an underwater caisson, a watertight chamber that may encase the part of pipeline in order that engineers may work inside it.
Marin believes this is able to be “the simplest answer.” Nevertheless, he provides, it will take months to acquire a clamp large enough to encase the pipeline. This methodology additionally gained’t work if there seems to be intensive injury, as a result of it’s not possible to construct clamps large enough to cowl important holes. A 3rd choice is a composite restore that mixes the 2 strategies: substitute the worst-damaged parts of the pipeline, and clamp these which can be much less affected.
Ribet suggests one probably much less seemingly fourth choice: constructing and putting in a brand new pipeline part that would bypass the broken sections, which might be left in place. Russian analysts additionally be aware that one in all Nord Stream’s 4 particular person pipelines seems to not have been affected, which means it may proceed to ship fuel, albeit at a decrease charge.
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