Texture in manufacturing pipeline steels for service in sour environment

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Safety of transportation of oil and gas provides a guarantee for sustainable energy supply. The fracture of linepipe may lead to environmental catastrophe and significant economic losses. Hydrogen induced cracking (HIC), sulphide stress cracking (SSC) and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in various types of linepipe steels are phenomena that are responsible for the majority of linepipe failures. The information recently published by us and other researchers indicates that special textured steels can have improved resistance to both HIC and SCC. These findings create an emerging but completely unexplored opportunity to manufacture new generation of linepipe steels with highly improved resistance to two major type of pipeline failure. The overall objective of the proposed program is designing new manufacturing processes for optimized texturing of steels. The texture and the grain-boundary character of pipeline steels (X65 and X70) will be analyzed and modified based on a complete understanding of the influence of thermo-mechanical processing on texture formation, and the role of texture in steel performance in sour environment will be investigated. Extensive tests of steel performance in sour environment, and after hydrogen charging will be conducted to relate the crack nucleation and propagation to steel structure and texture. This project will offer a novel approach towards the ultimate objective to enhance the steel performance by texture control. In the proposed research we plan to cooperate with EVRAZ Inc and CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory to develop processing technology for production of novel texture-modified linepipe steels, and finally transfer the related technology to Canadian manufacturing company Evraz.