Effect of degraded environmental conditions on the service behavior of a X65 pipeline steel not designed for hydrogen transport
Résumé
With the international drive to deploy green energies and decarbonized intermediates in
the place of fossil fuel sources, a large number of developed countries are actively preparing
for a future where hydrogen plays a strategic role as an energy storage medium.
Producing and using hydrogen requires the rapid expansion of a dedicated, economically
viable industrial sector. Nevertheless, questions on how to safely store, transport and
distribute hydrogen remain an important priority today. In countries with existing natural
gas transport grids, the possibility to retrofit these networks to store and transport
hydrogen-natural gas blends is being studied.
A key challenge is to evaluate how pressurized H2 would interact with steel structures
with regards structural embrittlement of the latter, with a view to exploiting existing
transport infrastructures for storage and transport applications. In this work, we evaluate
the H2-performance of a non-hydrogen service x65 pipeline steel. The cracking susceptibility
of this steel grade has been evaluated at 100 bar H2 using slow strain rate testing,
Constant strain testing and fracture toughness measurements. Accompanying hydrogen
permeation tests under pressure provide diffusion data and elucidate the discussion. Exposures
were carried out in dry or wet H2 and with or without H2S contamination at levels
representative of biogas. The results underline that the impact of dry or wet hydrogen on
this grade are moderate. The presence of traces of H2S together with humidity could risk
seriously degrading the mechanical performance of the x65 steel grade.
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