STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – The major gas leak last year in the Baltic Sea from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipeline caused Sweden’s annual territorial greenhouse gas emissions to rise, by 7%, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipes that pumped natural gas from Russia to Germany were ruptured in explosions in the exclusive economic zones of Sweden and Denmark in September 2022.
The United Nations shortly after said the ruptures led to probably the biggest single release of methane on record, after a big plume of concentrated methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent but shorter-lived than carbon dioxide, was detected.
The Swedish agency said in a statement greenhouse gas emissions in Sweden totalled 51.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (MTCO2EQ) in 2022, with the methane plume in its exclusive economic zone accounting for 5.8 million.
Excluding the Nord Stream leak, the emissions would have shrunk by 5% to 45.2 MTCO2EQ, it said.
“The reason for the increase was the gas leak from Nord Stream,” it said.
An agency spokesperson said the leaks in the Danish exclusive economic zone, which are not included in the Swedish data, equalled 8.5 MTCO2EQ, meaning the Nord Stream leaks had a total impact of around 14 million.
Formal investigations into the blasts have concluded sabotage but have yet to identify who was responsible.
(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom; Editing by Mark Potter)
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