Recommendations on X80 steel for the design of hydrogen gas transmission pipelines L. Briottet a, *, R. Batisse b , G. de Dinechin c , P. Langlois d , L. Thiers e a CEA, LITEN, DTBH, 17 rue des martyrs, F38054 Grenoble Cedex 9, France b GDF SUEZ, Saint-Denis La Plaine, France c CEA, DEN, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France d CNRS-LSPM, Universite´ Paris XIII, Villetaneuse, France e Air Liquide, Jouy-en-Josas, France article info Article history: Received 5 December 2011 Received in revised form 1 February 2012 Accepted 3 February 2012 Available online 6 March 2012 Keywords: Hydrogen embrittlement Infrastructure Hydrogen transmission Pipeline safety guidelines High grade steel abstract By limiting the pipes thickness necessary to sustain high pressure, high-strength steels could prove economically relevant for transmitting large gas quantities in pipelines on long distance. Up to now, the existing hydrogen pipelines have used lower-strength steels to avoid any hydrogen embrittlement. The CATHY-GDF project, funded by the French National Agency for Research, explored the ability of an industrial X80 grade for the transmission of pressurized hydrogen gas in large diameter pipelines. This project has developed experimental facilities to test the material under hydrogen gas pressure. Indeed, tensile, toughness, crack propagation and disc rupture tests have been performed. From these results, the effect of hydrogen pressure on the size of some critical defects has been analyzed allowing proposing some recommendations on the design of X80 pipe for hydrogen transport. Cost of Hydrogen transport could be several times higher than natural gas one for a given energy amount. Moreover, building hydrogen pipeline using high grade steels could induce a 10 to 40% cost benefit instead of using low grade steels, despite their lower hydrogen susceptibility. Copyright ª 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Hydrogen appears as one of the promising energy vectors for the next future to efficiently limit the greenhouse effect and to secure the energy demand increase related to the expected world population growth of two billions people between 2000 and 2030 [1]. Several demonstrative studies have started in the world [2e4]. Depending on the level of hydrogen penetration in the market, hydrogen transmission pipelines could conse- quently reach between 15.000 km and 35.000 km long in the world by 2050 [5]. Nowadays, about 3.000 km of hydrogen gaseous pipelines operate in the world under a maximum pressure of 100 bar to provide hydrogen for chemical or oil industries. These pipelines are generally built in low-strength grade steels, not higher than X52 [6]. With a hydrogen demand expected to increase, pipelines design should be adapted to make them deliver larger hydrogen quantities. Due to the low energy density of hydrogen, pipelines should sustain high hydrogen pressures in the range 150e200 bar. The economical solution would be the use of high-strength steel pipelines permitting to reduce the pipeline thickness and so the steel cost. Nevertheless, it is well known that high-strength steels * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ33 4 38 78 33 15; fax: þ33 4 38 78 58 91. E-mail address: laurent.briottet@cea.fr (L. Briottet). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/he international journal of hydrogen energy 37 (2012) 9423 e9430 0360-3199/$ e see front matter Copyright ª 2012, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijhydene.2012.02.009