- The leak is located about 70 kilometers from the city of Plock and affects one of the two lines of the pipeline.
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| The Druzhba oil pipeline. / Google Maps |
New energy sabotage? Poland detects a leak in the Druzhba pipeline, a key route for the supply of oil to Europe
Polish authorities are investigating an oil leak in the Druzhba pipeline, key to supplying crude to central Europe, detected on Tuesday night. The company in charge of the management is investigating the causes of the failure and for the moment rules out that it is sabotage.
The point where the incident occurred is about 70 kilometers from the city of Plock and 150 from Warsaw. and affects one of the two pipeline lines, according to a statement from the Polish operator, PERN. Its technicians have confirmed that only one of the line's pipes was affected and the other "works normally."
Experts from PERN and fire services have traveled to the area and it has been secured until further notice. According to Malgorzata Jarocka-Krzemkowska, a spokesman for the fire department reported to the Polish press, there are two deployed units that work on pumping the filtered oil and have already extracted about 400 cubic meters. "The leak occurred in a cornfield, far from buildings and communication routes. It is an underground leak and at the moment we do not know its scope," he explained.
The Druzhba pipeline, whose name means "friendship" in Russian, is one of the longest in the world and was built by the Soviet Union to link the oil fields of Western Siberia with Europe. The northern arm crosses Poland and reaches Germany, where it supplies the German refinery in Schwedt.
The affected section is the one with the highest capacity of the two that the pipeline has and can transport up to 77 million tons of oil per year. The cleaning tasks continue and, according to the firefighters, when most of the spilled oil is extracted, the causes of the breakdown can be identified.
A few days ago, Warsaw raised its alert level to the second highest to "secure energy infrastructure" nationally and will keep it in effect until November 30. This decision was made after the sabotage that occurred in the Nord Stream gas pipeline, whose authorship remains unclear but which the Polish government attributes to a possible Russian "provocation".
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