Nord Stream I and II
Today in Holes and Pits: a subsurface blast of gas under Scandinavian waters. Nord Stream I and II, the world’s longest offshore gas pipeline project at approximately 759 miles in length, runs the length of the Baltic Sea, from its source point in Russia to the shores of Germany. The Nord Stream pipelines have the capacity to send 55 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year to the EU. (That’s enough power to serve the needs of 26 million homes annually). The line itself is composed of twin 48” diameter steel pipes with concrete coating — looking a great deal like the dual barrels of a giant’s shotgun — resting on the sea bed at about 230 ft deep. Only 1.5 inches of material separate gas pumping through the line at 3,200 pounds per square inch of pressure from the sea at large, where the pressure of the surrounding environment is approximately eight times that on the surface.
The Baltic Sea is bordered by nine countries (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden) and as a result has been a realm of intense trade, competition and conflict for centuries. It’s a brackish body of water where ice flows form (occasionally freezing the entire sea’s surface) in cold months and violently break apart in the spring, and where regular winter storms beginning in October famously induce shipwrecks. In the medieval period, Viking travelers dominated its water and Norse kings extracted tariffs from regional traders in salt, hemp, lumber, and amber (a resource also mined in the sea itself since the 12th century). In the 18th century, it was Russia who emerged as a heavyweight power in the region, with Peter the Great founding his capital St Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva river and expanding the empire to Baltic shores. In more recent history, the Baltic sea was used as a dumping ground for chemical weapons after WWII, including unspent mustard gas and approximately 160,000 unexploded munitions (a NATO initiative called Operation Open Spirit is painstakingly removing the mines, but haven’t yet managed to remove more than 20% of what was dumped there). A 1990 report by Swedish television also accused the Russian government of disposing of nuclear waste in the Baltic, but the accusation remains unverified.
Into this politically and environmentally fraught marine body went the world’s largest gas pipeline, a sensitive item long before Nord Stream part II and Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. Nord Stream I was initially proposed in 1997 by a conglomerate of Finnish, Germans, and Russian energy companies. The chief stakeholder and project champion was Gazprom, an energy company owned 50% by the Russian state. Gazprom has engaged in a number of pipeline projects across Eurasia, including the Blue Stream pipeline, a joint venture between Gazprom and an Italian energy company that runs from Russia to Ankara, with portions under the Black Sea. Russia, which has 25% of the world’s known gas reserves, benefits from investing in infrastructure that the company controls to deliver its product directly and inexpensively to the European market. Gazprom’s current natural gas pipeline network is 155,000 km — the biggest in the world.
In 2005, the Baltic pipeline project was officially incorporated as Nord Stream I and moved its HQ to Zug, Switzerland, with design beginning in 2007. In spring of 2010, construction began; 200,000 individual segments of pipe were transported to strategic locations around the Baltic Sea in anticipation of a high-risk game of undersea K’nex. Three pipeline laying vessels were deployed and worked from opposite ends of the Baltic to meet in the middle, with crews working 24 hours per day. Animation videos meant to explain the fabrication of undersea pipelines show the tubes being continuously and hilariously extruded from the rear of the ship like toothpaste from a tube; in reality, crews would join about 3 km of pipe per day and slowly lower the segment to the sea floor. Once in place on the ocean floor, these larger segments would be joined to one another by specialists working in a vacuum sealed high pressure chamber placed on top of the line. (For a comprehensive discussion of the projects surveying, planning, and engineering, see this video explanation by Grady Hillhouse)
Shortly after the successful completion of Nord Stream I in 2012, investors began looking to expand the line’s capacity with Nord Stream, Part Deux. Between 2011 and 2015, previous partner states moved forward on permits, but Russian development lagged, partly due to sanctions previously imposed by the US (since the earlier 2014 conflict with Ukraine) that required the existing pipeline to run at half capacity. In 2017, the US began to pursue greater efforts to halt construction of the project through the passage of CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act ). The EU did not support the move, and threatened counter-sanctions. In keeping with the strategies of developers everywhere, the pipeline company generally ignored the geopolitical froth and kept trucking. Nord Stream II was effectively completed in late 2021.
The ongoing saga of Nord Stream I and II bears out a multiple decades long story of the intersection of energy markets, post-Cold War foreign policy, and climate change readiness. Russia’s current dominant role as Europe’s natural gas purveyor is partly a result of its geological luck and partly its aggressive construction campaign; Gazprom hustled to create the infrastructure that would ensure that Russian natural gas, already plentiful, would also be the cheapest and most readily available option for EU consumers. Ukraine, which actually has the second largest gas reserves in Europe after Russia, could put a significant dent in Russia’s market share; however while it currently plays host to transmission pipelines and extracts some transmission fees, its own natural gas resources remain untapped, and significant infrastructure development would be required to access them.
In addition to Russia’s aggressive construction campaign, two other factors also played a role. First, the liberalization of the European energy market in the early 2000s, spurred by the desire for an EU-wide integrated energy market and lower energy costs, created an opportunity for foreign suppliers such as Gazprom to gain a foothold in service provision; previously, energy provision had been a state-owned and state run enterprise. Second, the use of natural gas as a preferred source of power expanded as European countries focused on cleaner energy, shutting down coal plants and nuclear power plants to fulfill their national requirements and climate change policies.
In early 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provoked a swift financial response from European and NATO affiliated countries, including countries that had balked on earlier sanctioning efforts. Germany suspended certification of Nord Stream II in February as European and American politicians verbally and financially censured Russia for its military actions.
It is worth noting, however, that Nord Stream I is still operational and continuing to deliver gas resources to EU consumers in the midst of war. Nord Stream II, which is for all intents and purposes complete, lies directly alongside Nord Stream I, following the same path across the Baltic sea floor. Whether or not the tap turns on for the second phase of Nord Stream is not a logistical question but a political and economic one, and it’s unclear at this moment (April, 2022) whether the EU’s current path dependency on Russia’s natural gas will carry more weight than its concerns about Ukrainian autonomy.
