Pipeline integrity data for planning

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[Music] up next discussing hydrogen pipeline integrity we have neil gallin principal engineer with rosen group in the uk neil previously worked for various consulting and manufacturing companies including british steel tata steel and ge wellstream he holds a master's degree from the university of cambridge in materials science and metallurgy neil has 25 years experience in materials and welding engineering and is a chartered engineer a member of the institute of materials minerals and mining and a european slash international welding engineer his current work concentrates on understanding the effects of gaseous hydrogen and steel pipelines welcome neil okay thank you danny and i'm not sure about the slashing internationals but yeah i am a sort of wealthy engineer um i'm going to be talking about hydrogen pipeline integrity and i think it's already been covered to an extent in some of the other talks we've had today and i don't really want to go over the ground that others have covered but really just wanted to put the rosen point of view and how we see um the energy transition affecting our industry and how to maintain safety maintain integrity through the transition and make sure that the hydrogen pipelines that we are all interested in we're all talking about can continue to operate so really very quick background um again this is covering some of the stuff that i think colleagues from siemens and others mentioned before but the role of hydrogen it is the first element that was produced in the big bang it's the lightest it has been around for billions of years and it is the most common element in the universe it is really the ideal source for energy because it is so plentiful and it doesn't have the greenhouse gas effects um if it does get burnt you can produce it without a carbon footprint um either blue or green hydrogen um it can be transported over long distances except the comments about how economic it'll be um to transport it over ultra long distances but i think the other counter to that is that electricity can also not really be converted or not really transported over very long distances so there is i think going to be a role for hydrogen pipelines both within and probably across regions as well the other real benefit that it does have it can be used as a store medium and it can be used as a buffer and both of those can rely on a mixture of existing and new infrastructure so the salt cabin storage the pipeline infrastructure and repurposing of that building new pipelines it is intuitively i think a lot easier for most of us to imagine moving to hydrogen and keeping most of the same infrastructure and reusing it rather than having to put a windmill on the top of every roof or having banks and banks of batteries everywhere it has certainly got a role to play we believe it has got a real major role to play in the energy transition um you've seen this earlier i'm sure and i think you've probably seen it earlier this afternoon but it isn't just being talked about the major energy companies in europe have committed to a network of 40 000 kilometers of hydrogen pipelines in the next 20 years um the exact numbers they say around 69 of that is going to be existing infrastructure that's going to be repurposed and approximately 31 is going to be new pipelines as a bit of a sidetrack on that of that new pipelines a lot of that or some of that is actually going to be offshore pipelines i'm going to be concentrating mainly on onshore and the general effects of hydrogen but if you want to know more about offshore then i would encourage you to tune into one of the next vps's where some of my colleagues will be talking specifically about the challenges of offshore pipelines but going back to the onshore side again um a lot of investment is going to be required uh the total investment a very big ballpark figure gap somewhere between 43 and 81 billion euros is expected most of that is going to be in the new infrastructure and in repurposing the existing infrastructure um looking at the wider picture then there was a report for the hydrogen council that was done earlier this year and they looked at both projections for hydrogen um production and hydrogen investment over the next 10 years and the graphs there speak for themselves the project amount of hydrogen production is going to increase pretty rapidly if not exponentially over the next 10 years looking on the left hand side then they did the same exercise in 2019 and that's the dotted line which is lower if you look at the 2020 prediction then it is going to be roughly three times that so not only is there a lot of investments being announced a lot of it or the rate of announcement and the amount that is being announced is increasing every year again if you look at the right-hand side then what 40 billion us dollars has already been realized or already been either spent or money has been allocated and reserved and is in the process of being spent 45 billion is in fairly extent or advanced engineering studies 262 billion so the wise largest proportion is still being announced it's going to be needed it's going to happen but it hasn't yet gone to the engineering and the investment stage of this big slice over here then you can see a large bit of it is the distribution which has not been really covered so far in the planning and investment or realization side this distribution chunk is within pipelines if you look at a lot of what has been mentioned and the rationale behind using the existing infrastructure and i will say right from the off that we at rosen do believe that certainly the majority of the new of the existing infrastructure can be reused then there is a lot of say that it can probably be reused and there will be virtually no effect and that there will be little change if you go to hydrogen values so small words can cover a lot of detailed investigation requires probably being okay is not the same as definitely being okay and if you're putting hydrogen through a pipeline that's going down the end of your road then you want to be sure that it is going to be as safe as it is today when there's natural gas going through it that really comes into well how do you manage it how do you make sure that it is safe um really pipeline operators are currently facing a lot of challenges that they are managing the integrity of the existing infrastructure that is gradually growing older they are managing the threat of the various time dependent external corrosion cracking mechanisms third-party damage and they're doing it successfully because generally as an industry we are good engineers we can manage natural gas pipelines and we can do it safely with hydrogen there are two real questions um can we convert it and once it's been converted then how do you manage the integrity i think the answer to both those questions really are yes it can be done but you do need to recognize that hydrogen is not the same as natural gas and that it does have its own unique properties some of them to do with the gas or the energy carrying capability i mentioned earlier some of them to do with the effects of hydrogen on mechanical properties on steel properties um over the last year or two probably a little bit longer now um we at rosen have been going from the being vaguely aware and interested in hydrogen to really diving headlong into it um we've been looking at the material challenges the guidelines that are required to convert a pipeline how to assess a hydrogen pipeline and how that compares to a natural gas pipeline um testing of components so we're obviously a big inspection company and we have successfully inspected hydrogen pipelines in the past to do that we had to do various material compatibility testing of our tools which i can get into a little bit more detail later on and we have successfully inspected hydrogen pipelines in operation so we have been learning an awful lot and we have been doing an awful lot of work to try and work out how to convert pipelines and how to assess them how to manage them and how to inspect them the major learning that we've been looking at that has really sort of been the most interesting and cause the most headaches is that hydrogen does have an effect on mechanical properties of steel your gases hydrogen that is being transported through the inside of the pipe in molecular form will dissociate at the surface of the steel and it will be absorbed into the pipe wall the effect that that has it doesn't have that much effect on strength as measured by yield strength it does decrease your ductility um if you're looking at ductility as measured by reduction in area or by total elongation it reduces your fracture toughness um it doesn't there's not that much data what it does to your sharpie toughness which is another challenge way sometimes you only have sharpie data but it does decrease your um true fracture toughness and it increases the fatigue crack growth rate so those are the sort of qualitative um effects the hydrogen has if we are assessing a real pipeline and converting a rail line then you need to quantify those effects and that is actually proving to be really surprisingly difficult if you look at the effects on fracture toughness then depending upon which paper you look at which test protocol have used which materials they've tested what environment they've chosen the reduction in fracture toughness can vary massively between around about 10 and some reports are up to about 90 reduction in fracture toughness the other real complicating factor is the partial pressure of hydrogen that some reports say you need a fairly high hundreds of bar equivalent partial pressure of hydrogen to have a significant effect other reports say that if you only have one bar less than one bar partial pressure hydrogen it does have a large effect um similar effect for fatigue where there are again a lot of variables looking at your delta k your loading rate um the frequency of the fatigue cycling and various other factors as well as the material itself um the way the way that i think we're interpreting this at the moment is that it is very difficult to realistically get safe conservative lower bound numbers that can be applied to all pipelines for all properties and there is going to be a requirement for some form of testing of characterization of understanding the requirements and the reaction of that individual pipeline to hydrogen and how it's going to change um the general approach that we have taken to try and address these challenges and how we've adapted our learning is really summarized in our housing integrity framework which is outlined on here there's nothing particularly conceptually difficult or challenging about it but it's all about understanding your threat gathering your data working out what the credible threats are seeing what data needs to quantify those threats filling the gaps and getting enough data there that you can make an informed engineering database judgment on the threats you can then work out what are the real ones what you need to do immediate repairs to and what can be left a bit longer how to assess it do you find reporting and feed that into an interior management plan that is tailored that is specific to hydrogen a key part of this um is data management not really going to go into the role of big data and how so experience of multiple different pipelines can be used to infer the properties and condition of existing pipelines but again i would encourage you to tune into one of the next vpss where one of my colleagues will be talking about that but start off with this data management threat analysis understanding the threats and then choosing the right techniques technologies to investigate we can look at this as a really a phased approach um the first most important key part of it is really understanding the project terms of reference and working out how you're going to convert the line what the strategy is laid out some of the steps that we think are required it's part of phase one here once you've got that data in place and once you've filled all the gaps then you can go ahead to establishing the current condition working out what you need to do doing the inline inspection doing the assessments doing whatever repairs remediation work is required getting ready for conversion making sure that you've checked all of the code the regulatory requirements doing your testing as required doing your risk assessments feeding that all in to a final pipeline integrity management plan a hydrant specific integrity management plan a lot of where we are at the moment i think a lot of where the industry generally is at the moment is all about this number one what do you need to do to understand can your pipeline be converted and how to go about doing it i'm really going to go into a little bit more detail on this section um mentioned before that we saw the real threats as being revolving around materials so the effect of hydrogen on those materials quantifying the um effect on your fracture toughness on your fatigue growth rate and quantifying what is going to happen when you put hydrogen into there the other threat which we see is being key because fatigue is known to be a threat because fracture toughness is don't be a threat it's cracks if you have any cracks in your pipeline if you have any crack like indications in your pipeline then really need to understand those to assess them to investigate them and possibly to mitigate or remove them so the two real gaps that we see is needing to be filled in material properties data and existing cat pipeline condition especially with respect to crack like threats so the way that we've got it here you can see the the various steps that we've gone down there understanding the existing pipeline condition that means looking at your existing records existing risk assessments what inspection reports what ili data what construction records have you already got if it is a fairly modern well-maintained recently inspected line chances are most of this will already be in place and it is really going to be a bit of a sense check to make sure it's okay if it's an older line where there's going to be less um i suppose less recent inspections may be constructed in the 1960s and some of the construction data some of the repairs the re-routing replacements have been changed then this is likely to be a bit more challenging and there like to be more gaps material properties is a key input and it is investigating the material property data that is available this includes not just the grades it includes the original material prop test material test certificates from the manufacturer if they are available and it includes hopefully any cutouts that are available and whether there is any test data that can be gained from them as me b3112 which is probably the recognized code for hydrogen pipelines does explicitly say that if you're converting a line to hydrogen and you haven't got the original material test certificates you need to do a dig and destructively test at a rate of one per mile which is obviously very um potentially very expensive very time consuming as well but it does reflect the importance of material properties and material um data knowing that looking at the route the location classes um or whatever the local equivalent of those is seeing where the hazards are key of this is identifying where the gaps are and if you do if there are any gaps in terms of knowledge of the features of the root of the materials properties then what are they where do they exist and how do you fill them um work out the strategy for how to fill those gaps address any potential code and unconformities make this pipeline hatching ready key part of this is the role of inline inspection and using ins or intelligent technology to help understand the current condition of your pipeline and do this baseline inspection cracks material properties are the real major differences between hydrogen and natural gas and we as rosen i've got technologies that are probably well we think they are well suited and well fitted to addressing those and quantifying them giving your pipeline operator a real chance to put some science and some engineering behind these assessments we have got our crack detection we have got our emac tools which can run in a dry environment so they can be run through a gas pipeline and you can get crack sizing from your emats tools if required um we have also got and i think what probably the only people who do have an inline inspection service that does actually directly measure your material property other material properties of the pipe so the roma pgs service um will give you a yield strength for every joint in the length of your line which is really ideal and does help identify populations identifies smarter dig locations and works out where the real potential differences and threats could be compared when you put hydrogen into your line and the dmg tool does inspect for hard spots it is known the titan does have an effect on the material properties if you've already got a material property anomaly or a hard spot in there then you need to work out some way to inspect them the dmg tool is ideal for that so really we're looking at hydrogen specific threats and defects the threat is all revolving around cracking the magnitude of that cracking threat depends both upon the size of the crack and the material properties that you are assessing the crack with and the tools to address those would be your emat and your pgs or crack detection and material property ili um ili in hydrogen itself so if you do your baseline inspection then you also then need to be doing iolite and hydrogen after the fact and making sure that your cracks or crack like defects aren't being generated around growing it's difficult it is challenging um i know that it's fairly hot topic in the industry at the moment rosen have done it we do do it um this is a case study that we can did actually three years ago it was a 10 inch line um for 1996 it was actually purposeful for hydrogen and there was a 19 kilometer stretch that required ili previously the standard method for inspecting hydrogen pipelines that we need to use water as the propellant and we worked with the operator and 2017 we successfully inspected it re-inspected in 2019 using heritage as the propellant to do that we had to make various adaptations to the tool used non-standard cups um adapted the design to account for different flow rates and pressures that we mentioned before and we protected the magnets so they weren't dissolved by the hydrogen tools are obviously text compliance um results were that both times we were successful and both times first time run through 100 coverage and data was acceptable for control evaluation the run speed was tricky in some areas there were some velocity spikes but we could mitigate against those with the hydrogen-specific tool design and we accepted all the data for evaluation um the outcome of this obviously massive cost cost savings from the operator compared to having to do the batching with water and a lot smarter integrity decisions were available um really this comes back to the the whole thing about this phased approach the hydrogen um integrity framework how do you choose the property are probably will be okay and should be able to be converted to a will be okay and can be converted it is all about using all of the available technology all the available tools everything that's out there um the inspection technology mentioned before the testing the consultancy be able to choose the correct tools the most appropriate tools not always the most expensive not always all of the tools but making sure that the right ones and you understand the threats and you're using the right tools to look for those threats managing the integrity of it which all feeds into safety compliance there is a the codes how to extend the life of your pipeline and how to ensure that it continues performing um you can see the rest of there you minimize your uncertainties increasing performance in share compliance if we do all of these if we take this structured um detailed robust approach and we take it step by step through then i think we don't say that the infrastructure probably can be converted and it should be okay we say it can be converted and it will be okay but we need to do it right and we need to go through the due diligence do steps identify the um threats and manage them so thank you all that's great thank you so much neil uh great presentation we're just running a little bit short on time so i'm sure anybody with uh with questions on this presentation can follow up with you afterwards thanks again neil yep no thank you