Development of high-pressure hydrogen pipelines: The state-of-the-art

Abstract

Facing the 21st century`s major energy-related problems arising from non-renewable nature of fossil fuels and serious environmental pollutions, recently the demands for the use of hydrogen as alternative main energy have been explosively increased. To meet the demands and prepare the up-coming era of so-called `hydrogen economy`, many researches focused on the related topics are actively conducted all round the world; e.g., in the United States (US), President Bush announced `the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative` in 2003 and pledged $1.2 billion dollars over five years to hydrogen and fuel cell research and development. With a viewpoint of industrial field applications, one of the important topics being studied is an issue of hydrogen transmission (more specifically, `hydrogen pipeline`). Today, hydrogen is being transported primarily by railroad cars, cryogenic liquid trucks, gaseous tube trailers, tanker ships and a limited amount of hydrogen pipelines. Among them, pipeline is conceivably the most economic way to consistently and safely transport a large amount of hydrogen over a long distance, which may be strongly requested in hydrogen economy era. Although hydrogen pipelines have already been operating over the past 50 years, they are still very limited (e.g., only 1300 miles in Europe and US, while natural gas pipelines in US alone are over one million miles) and designed for low service pressure. So, the development of advanced high-pressure hydrogen pipelines is highly desirable. In this talk, the recent on-going researches on the development of high-pressure hydrogen pipelines (especially, in US) will be introduced and the hydrogen effects on the mechanical behavior of the candidate materials for the hydrogen pipeline will be critically reviewed.