Authorities were trying to determine the cause of leaks in two gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea after both suffered a sudden drop in pressure, German and Danish officials said.
Neither pipeline, Nord Stream 1 and 2, was active, but both were full of natural gas when they suffered a sharp drop in pressure on Monday, which authorities said could only have been caused by a leak.
“There must be big holes; otherwise the pressure would not fall so quickly,” Fiete Wulff, spokesperson for the German network agency, said on Tuesday. “There is no other way to explain it.”
Pipelines have been at the center of the wider confrontation between Russia and Europe. After the European Union imposed economic sanctions on Russia to penalize it for invading Ukraine, Russia began withholding the natural gas it had been sending abundantly for decades to Europe, threatening its supply energy as winter approaches.
German and Danish officials said the cause of the leaks was not immediately clear, but investigations were ongoing. The leaks would not affect the security of either country’s gas supply, they said.
Russia’s Gazprom halted deliveries via Nord Stream 1 indefinitely earlier this month amid a lingering dispute with Germany over gas supplies. Nord Stream 2 was never made operational after Germany revoked its certification on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Germany’s energy ministry said in a statement on Monday that a network operator had reported “a sharp drop in pressure” in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The Danish Maritime Authority said the leak appeared to have occurred off a Danish island and issued a shipping warning for the area.
In addition, the operator of Nord Stream 1 declared having detected a drop in pressure which was later confirmed by the German Ministry of the Economy. The pipeline is made up of approximately 100,000 concrete-lined steel pipes designed to withstand the pressure change the gas experiences during the 760-mile journey from Russia to Germany. They rest on the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
The head of the German network regulator, Klaus Müller, wrote on Twitter that the country was no longer dependent on Nord Stream 1 but that the development underscored the tense situation around the pipelines.