Corrosion Failure and Control of Carbon Steel and Anti-CorrosionPerformance Evaluation of Candidate Materials in Thermal Applications

摘要

This study presents an investigation of the on-site corrosion of carbon steel pipes with stainless steel meshscreens in a steam flood well in the Athabasca oil sand reservoirs to determine the failure patterns andmechanisms. To mitigate the corrosion of carbon steel, several candidate materials were selected, and theircorrosion resistance was investigated. In this work, the corrosion behavior and film characteristics of carbon steel pipes were studied bysurface analysis techniques such as scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spetrocsopy and X-ray diffraction. Corrosion resistant alloys (proRSf and proRSc), anti-corrosion coating (proRA05a) and pre-treated steel (proRAQa) were considered as alternative materials to carbon steel (proRAa and proRAb) andtheir corrosion protection performance in brine solution was evaluated by electrochemical methods such aspotentiodynamic sweep and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. Results show that severe erosion-corrosion occurred on inner wall of the pipes and caused significantwall-thinning of pipes along with localized corrosion damages, which is the dominant reason for base pipefailure. In spite of the slight corrosion on outer wall of the base pipe, severe localized corrosion appearedat the interface between the carbon steel pipe and stainless steel mesh screens due to the galvanic corrosioneffect of dissimilar metals. The corrosion rates of the corrosion-resistant materials were two or three ordersof magnitude lower than that of carbon steel. The corrosion resistance ranking order is proRSc > proRSf> proRA05a > proRAQa > proRAa > proRAb. This study improves the material selection procedure in thermal operations by investigating severalalternatives to carbon steel. It also provides a testing procedure to assess the corrosion resistance of thematerial in thermal applications.