According to unofficial sources coming from the Province of Nogay Steppe of the Caucasus Emirate, simultaneously with the destruction of 2 military bases in Ulyanovsk, additional resource has also been destroyed, a Subterranean Gas Storage Facility stationed at Caucasus Emirate (further referred as CE) territory. This facility is reported to be the largest in the world.
The event's "handwriting" surprisingly reminds of Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP's (hydro power plant) destruction earlier this year in Russia with simultaneous liquidation of a big lair of the so called "militia" members in the territory of CE.
According to an internal Russian news agency sources:
"Friday the 13th has become The Day of The Catastrophes in Russia. The blow was hit to the strategic targets, very sensitive ones.
Main issue of the news in the Media became the mysterious fires at military warehouses of Ulyanovsk: there have been reports on tens of casualties, thick smoke in the city, and a possible leakage of chemical warheads. The local population reports water supply deficiency and many are wearing gauze masks.
This is a serious (possibly a VERY serious) incident of federal magnitude, especially if the warehouses indeed had chemical weaponry. Yet, the incident in Ulyanovsk is not the main incident of the November the 13th 2009.
Our sources report in Stavropol region there has been a global accident at the world's biggest subterranean natural gas storage facility at North-Stavropol based near the village of Ryzdvyany. The area is declared a military zone and surrounded by military forces. Any information from there is censored and just for the case of successful information leak TV translates something about a small fire on the transporting lines of the gas in the area, which has supposedly been put off.
However a "small fire" is obviously not the case, since just the fire pillar spotted by the bystanders in their opinions reaches 200-300 meters, and even often reminds a nuclear mushroom.
About the scale and the consequences of this we can judge just by the scale of the object of this accident. This Catastrophe is much more serious than the Ulyanovsk military warehouses, both technically speaking and mainly politically.
The North Stavropol Subterranean Gas Storage facility combined with natural gas field, the biggest one in the world regulates seasonal gas supply irregularity of the Southern Federal County of Russia. The consumers of this resource are Caucasus republics, Ukraine and also the robustness of export supply depends on it.
The volume of the kept gas is not even reported officially anywhere, which also indicates this facility's importance. One can only estimate it, more than a plain approximation, but the order of tens of milliards of cubic meters is probably the right order. This means we're talking about a facility of great strategic and political importance here.
It is known, that due to overfilling of this storage the bearing stratum layers went into an irregular to this area dynamic gas mode, which caused serious deformations of the landscape reported by geodesic observation since in the period of 1975-1990.
Later, when the nearby natural gas field has been processed again the situation worsened. Uncontrolled fluxes of pressurized gas together with gas permissive soil cause multiple cracks and breaks of the solids. As a result, after the gas from the fields was again being collected, spontaneous ground collapses with consecutive gas releases to the surface occurred. But, like with Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP, during the "privatization" period the federal hands were busy with other things. i.e. the facility has been very vulnerable.
Now, at this very facility some kind of large scale accident happened. It is completely unclear what is going on there on the surface (the area is closed), and it is even less clear what's going on underneath the surface of the earth, approximately at 1 km below, where the gas field is assumed to reside. But something else is absolutely clear now.
Natural Gas is a product which cannot be kept in a bucket, letting you sit and wait when a good price has come. This "bucket" role can be served by the subterranean gas storage facilities (SGSFs). Therefore any SGSF is a key node of the gas transportation network, which can be used to regulate seasonal or technical usage fluctuations of gas in a region. And when for one reason or the other a user-region is plugged off the remainder is pushed into the SGSF.
But the North Stavropol SGSF is not just a node. This is a huge node, the biggest on the planet. It regulates the gas flow to Caucasus, Turkey, Europe and the whole Southern Russia. Accordingly, the users of this node are not just factories or gas companies, but countries. For example, when the last year's "gas war" with Kiev went on, Ukraine has been shut off the pipeline. The gas from Urengoy simply was pushed into the North Stavropol SGSF.
At a time, in Ukraine there has been a common opinion that Russia cannot stop supplying gas via its transit pipeline since it simply has no where to put it. Some off-the-record remarks from Ukraine government were made about this. They all took into the account the publicly known estimation about the Russian's SGSFs capacity.
However, as it occurred, they were all wrong. About the estimation that Russia has nowhere to put its gas to even Yushhenko has spoken in one of the interviews to western TV companies. Therefore, to Julia Timoshenko's parliament it's been a very unpleasant discovery, when the gas stopped.
The Russian SGSF capacity was sufficient to store all the retrieved natural gas. The Ukrainian politicians were wrong, and Timoshenko had to pay a bowing visit to Moscow. The main role in this capacity was served by the North Stavropol's SGSF. And its real capacity remains unknown and now by a mistake.
Now, if this SGSF temporarily or permanently stops operating, either Ukraine will be able to dictate the Urengoy gas prices in order to "help" Russia prevent gas mines operation disruption (which is also costly, and sometimes renders a mine unusable) or Russia will have to burn the gas at Urengoy, since there's no other way of feasible utilization methods for natural gas.
The accident's date, Friday the 13-th, 2 Catastrophes,
both happen the next day after the presidential public message...
Another amazing coincidence?
It is either a very bad sign for the Russian leadership from the Heavens,
or somebody is working very very hard.
Yes, and Chechnya is not very far away.
Very strange coincidence"
Department of Monitoring,
Kavkaz Center
