Home › World › Why Nord Stream 1 stayed shut on 2 September 2022
Why Nord Stream 1 stayed shut on 2 September 2022
Summary
A retrospective on Gazprom's announcement that gas flows to Europe would not restart as planned, citing a turbine fault.
What did Gazprom say when Europe expected Russian gas to start flowing again? On 2 September 2022, the company announced that flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline would not resume on 3 September, as had been expected. It cited an oil leak in a turbine and gave no new time frame.
The announcement followed the G7's announcement, as reported at the time, and came two days after Gazprom's first statement on the stoppage. On 31 August 2022, the company had said it was shutting Nord Stream 1 completely for three days for unscheduled maintenance. That implied a restart on 3 September.
The 2 September statement removed that date. Gazprom offered the turbine leak as the reason and did not say when the pipeline might return to operation.
The episode formed part of the wider Russia–European Union gas dispute of 2022. In the space of two days, a short, defined outage became an open-ended halt to supplies through one of the pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe.
