Abstract
The continued growth of the world’s developing countries has placed an ever increasing demand on traditional fossil fuel energy sources. This development has lead to increasing research and development of alternative energy sources. Hydrogen gas is one of the potential alternative energy sources under development. Currently the most economical method of transporting large quantities of hydrogen gas is through steel pipelines. It is well known that hydrogen embrittlement has the potential to degrade steel’s mechanical properties when hydrogen migrates into the steel matrix. Consequently, the current pipeline infrastructure used in hydrogen transport is typically operated in a conservative fashion. This operational practice is not conducive to economical movement of significant volumes of hydrogen gas as an alternative to fossil fuels.
The degradation of the mechanical properties of steels in hydrogen service is known to depend on the microstructure of the steel. Understanding the levels of mechanical property degradation of a given microstructure when exposed to hydrogen gas under pressure can be used to evaluate the suitability of the existing pipeline infrastructure for hydrogen service and guide alloy and microstructure design for new hydrogen pipeline infrastructure. To this end, the
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microstructures of relevant steels and their mechanical properties in relevant gaseous hydrogen environments must be fully characterized to establish suitability for transporting hydrogen.
A project to evaluate four commercially available pipeline steels alloy/microstructure performance in the presences of gaseous hydrogen has been funded by the US Department of Energy along with the private sector. The microstructures of four pipeline steels were characterized and then tensile testing was conducted in gaseous hydrogen and helium at pressures of 800, 1600 and 3000 psi. Based on measurements of reduction of area, two of the four steels that performed the best across the pressure range were selected for evaluation of fracture and fatigue performance in gaseous hydrogen at 800 and 3000 psi.
This paper will describe the work performed on four commercially available pipeline steels in the presence of gaseous hydrogen at pressures relevant for transport in pipelines. Microstructures and mechanical property performances will be compared. In addition, recommendations for future work related to gaining a better understanding of steel pipeline performance in hydrogen service will be discussed.
