Full disclosure, I love seeing Russian shit go boom in the night.
But, having spent my professional career working in and around gas processing plants, where the marvels of technology showcase the simplicity of Newtonian physics, where everything around you is a hazard and safety is preached every day, all day, until it becomes your way of life, it is with mixed emotions that I share my thoughts here. The people that work here don't carry guns, they carry pictures of their kids.
"Russia says overnight Ukrainian drone attack targets gas facility in Orenburg region Governor says fire broke out at a workshop of partially damaged facility, adds no casualties reported" - Burc Eruygur 19.10.2025
Nor was it a just a "workshop fire." I can't even write that without laughing out loud!!!
You all have been very patient with me as I drone on (you like that ?) about hitting specific targets rather than simply lobbing grenades over the fence. A gas plant has nothing but large pressure vessels full of high pressure natural gas and Natural Gas Liquids.
And massive gas plants with a series of "trains" of multiple process vessels, heat exchangers, pumps and compressors, and separators and condensers, ...
My screenshot of the Orenberg Gas Plant.
I have highlighted in red the tall Red & White striped smokestacks you see in the photos and the video in the OP. The video is shot from the road to the south, ~ 3/4 mile from where the actual fire is. I have highlighted what I call "Process Towers" in yellow, which is where most of the intense fire is, between the smokestacks. It would appear that massive fireball envelopes most of the process towers.
The roar of the fire in the video is the expansion of high pressure gas at sonic velocity, depressuring rapidly from 1,000 PSI to atmospheric pressure, and to make it really exciting, igniting and burning. The heat from a truck fire will melt everything but the wheels and the drive shaft. This fire, with a constant fuel source, won't leave much of anything.
Just for fun, crank the sound on the video of the fire up to 10, 11 if you have it. This is from a cell phone 3/4's of a mile from the fire.
The Orenburg Gas Plant is one of the largest in the world, 2nd to the massive Empress Plant in Alberta, CA, (maybe something in Qatar?). This plant is 4 times larger than anything in the Lower 48 of the US, processing gas from the Orenburg region of Russia, as well as gas produced from the Karachaganak oil and gas fields in neighboring Kazakhstan.
The gas processed at the plant is the two extremes of natural gas; (i) Gas with any helium content is very valuable (used to be ~100x the price of natural gas) and usually becomes government property and has a processing plant built just to extract the helium, and (ii) the other side of the equation, gas with extremely high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), mercaptan sulfur and carbon dioxide (CO2), "acid gases", which are lethal after 1 breath at these levels. The commercial spec on natural gas pipelines is 4 parts per million (ppm); some of this gas has 6.8 % H2S, 68,000 ppm.
This is a case where you isolate the fuel source, and let the fire burn itself out. Even then, the products of combustion include sulfuric acid and carbon acid, among other things. You always want to be upwind of these plants.
2 good links below:
Ukrainian drones ignite one of Russia’s largest gas plants 1,200+ km from front lines
ORENBURG GAS CHEMICAL COMPLEX
Some Gas Plant porn:
The 7 "smokestacks" are easily identifiable, and the multiple flares can be seen, where the "off gases" are burned in a controlled manner.
In the photo below, as you look at the smokestacks, the various process towers can be see in the foreground and to the right. Gas processing towers are not as big and tall as refinery towers, as more of them operate at higher pressures, up to 1,000 PSI, and some of them operate at temperatures as low as - 170 °F. The roadway in the OP video would be to the right in this picture, with most everything in front of the 4 smokestacks within the fireball.
Nice shot of a mushroom cloud against the backdrop of a much larger fire, probably a smaller pressure vessel having a "BLEVE", a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion.
It occurs when a container holding a pressurized liquid, like propane or other industrial gases, is heated to a point where the internal pressure becomes too great for the vessel to withstand (the boiling liquid vaporizes at a higher rate than the capacity of the relief valve). This causes the container to rupture, and the liquid flashes into a large vapor cloud, resulting in a powerful explosion and, if the contents are flammable, a massive fireball.