Here’s how the Nord Stream gas pipelines could be fixed

… Now the race is on to fix the vital pipelines before winter—if that’s even possible. The Swiss-based joint venture behind Nord Stream, which is 51% owned by the Russian state energy firm Gazprom, is uncertain whether the issues will ever be fixed….

…The steel Nord Stream pipes are 1.6 inches thick, with up to another 4.3 inches of concrete wrapped around them. Each of the 100,000 or so sections of the pipeline weighs 24 metric tons..ll

… Once investigators can safely get hands on, the tricky work of triaging the problems and finding solutions begins. “You assess: ‘Okay, what is the state of the pipe? What are the damages?’” says Jean-François Ribet of the Monaco-based oil and gas pipeline repair company 3X Engineering, which has previously repaired pipelines in Yemen that have been sabotaged by the likes of Al-Qaeda. That assessment can be done using an inspection robot, a remotely operated vehicle, or specialized divers. …

… Sending divers to the site is challenging because of the depth of the pipeline: while the known leaks are concentrated in relatively shallow waters—around 50 meters deep—the majority of the pipeline lies 80 to 100 meters underwater. And all of it will need to be inspected for potential damage.

“We’ve done repairs at that depth, but you have to use saturation diving,” says Olivier Marin, R&D and technical manager at 3X Engineering. (In saturation diving, which is used for deep-sea conditions, divers remain at the extreme depth in a specialized habitat and undergo a single decompression once the operation is over.)…

… The repairs themselves would not be easy. There are a number of options, says Ribet. The first is to replace the damaged sections of the pipe in their totality—though that’s the costliest.

Thank you, for posting this article by MIT.

Thus far, almost everything I've come across, including this article, is on the sabotage bandwagon with the finger pointing that falls from that.

As I understand it, a Netherlands navel ship specialized in submarine rescue is being deployed to inspect the blowout sections. It's equipped with the equipment and crew, in my opinion, to take pictures and not much more than that.

Again in my opinion, this is inadequate. To do a proper inspection, a specialized geophysical crew ship augmented with oilfield pipeline engineers would be a more competent physical inspection and technically independent to provide nonbiased opinions based on discovered pipeline conditions. All the conditions.

AFAIK, no inspections have yet been made. Two specialists were quoted, neither with quantitative information of what is underwater, that say a couple of things that are unsupported by discovered facts and speculations mirroring the claims of competing political interests. Sabotage Sabotage! Maybe yes, maybe no.

One line of thought expressed is along the line that these pipes are really thick steel encased in concrete. The concrete is a negligible factor in any of this. It's heavy keep the pipe from floating and cushions some from impacts. All high pressure oilfield pipe is thick to not only handle normal operating pressure but to resist surge loads that will occur. A second point raised is that submerged pipeline breaks such as these are a once in a 100,000 year event. Give me a break. Why are there submerged pipeline repair companies in operation around the world.

A known and not at all uncommon occurrence in methane pipelines in the oilfield and high capacity methane pipelines is the formation of methane hydrate accumulation and plugs. Water in the methane and low temperatures favor the methane hydrate formation. In conditions or low or especially zero flow, the hydrate can actually plug a pipeline. The Nord pipelines have been at this zero to low flow state for several months. It is plausible that methane flow was increased too quickly in the pipelines and that a methane hydrate plug was dislodged, goes flying down the pipe and hammered fittings or welds loose that expanded to a rupture.

While sabotage is certainly plausible, methane hydrate is also plausible. Inspection and competent evaluation will decide which is accurate. I'll add to that independent evaluation is required to reduce doubts that someone has a finger on the scale on what happened.

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