Baltic Pipe starts pumping gas from Norway into Poland

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The Baltic Pipe gas pipeline has started pumping oil gas from the Norwegian shelf into Poland via Denmark, Polish gas pipeline operator GAZ-System said on Saturday, just a few days after the incidents that disabled Russia's Nord Stream pipeline into Europe.

"As promised more than 6 years ago, we have kept our word. Today at 6.10 a.m. [04:10 GMT], gas started to be transported to Poland via BalticPipe," the operator wrote on Twitter, adding that its initial capacity would be up to 62.4 million cubic meters per day.

The pipeline is expected to reach its full capacity of 10 billion cubic meters per year by the beginning of 2023.

Poland had Russian energy cut off from it after Warsaw refused to comply with Moscow's demand to have its energy supplies paid for in Russian rubles. Poland was receiving around 10 billion cubic meters of Russian gas per year through the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

The Polish energy sector hopes to compensate for the lost supply of Russian gas via Norway through Denmark. Developed back in 2017, the project is the result of Warsaw and Copenhagen signing a memorandum on its construction.

The Baltic Pipe was inaugurated on September 27 with the participation of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen.

European Parliament member and former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski tweeted "Thank you, USA," along with a picture of the massive gas spill in the Baltic Sea. Off the shore of the Danish island of Bornholm, both pipelines sustained significant damage in what is now largely seen as a premeditated attack.

He later deleted the tweet posted in the aftermath of the explosions that affected Russia's Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines earlier in the week.

He had no reservations about who could have been responsible for Monday's Nord Stream pipeline explosion that shut off Germany from Russian gas.

However, Sikorski did not delete another tweet that read "As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy" with the same picture of the bubbling water attached.

The Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN) reported powerful underwater explosions in the area of gas leaks from the Nord Stream pipeline on Tuesday.

SNSN Director Bjorn Lund said as quoted by SVT that "there are no doubts that these were explosions."

Denmark's maritime traffic agency and Sweden's Maritime Authority reported on Monday a "dangerous" gas leak in the Baltic Sea close to the route of the inactive Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which experienced an unexplained drop in pressure.

The leak, southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm, "is dangerous for maritime traffic" and "navigation is prohibited within a five nautical mile radius of the reported position," the agency warned in a notice to ships.

It was revealed days later that US military helicopters habitually and on numerous occasions circled for hours over the site of the Nord Stream pipelines incident near Bornholm Island earlier in September.

Flightradar24 data showed that earlier in September a US Navy Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawk helicopter spent hours loitering over the location of the damaged natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea near Bornholm for several days in a row, September 1, 2, and 3, in particular.