Peculiarities of Corrosion Cracking of High-Strength Pipe Steels in Hydrogen Sulfide Environment

Currently, there is a gradual increase in oil production from fields contaminated with a high content of corrosive fluid. At the same time, the service life of oil production equipment may be only a few months. Such equipment includes pump-compressor and casing pipes that form an underground borehole, as well as above-ground field pipelines, which for economic reasons are overwhelmingly made of low-alloy steels. When analyzing the existing risk factors, the process of stress corrosion cracking of pipes in water fluids containing hydrogen sulfide (SSCC) is highlighted among the main ones. Existing SCC methods are expensive and require significant time –up to 30 days for testing. In this paper, on the example of studies of 34CrMo steel, the results are presented and a method is developed that significantly reduces the time required to determine the SSCC of high-strength steels. The results of comparative tests conducted using method A of the NACE TM 0177 standard and the proposed method showed almost complete coincidence of results, while the time spent on the tests was about 2.5 times less than in the NACE TM 0177 tests