Grant: Alliance Grants

CO2 pipelines are a critical component of the carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies to reduce CO2 emissions and mitigate climate change. It has been projected that the total length of CO2 pipelines worldwide could reach 550,000 km by 2050. CO2 pipelines may fail due to various causes such as corrosion, stress corrosion cracking, external interference and incorrect operation. Since CO2 is an asphyxiant and denser than air, failure of CO2 pipelines can have life safety consequences. Therefore, risk assessments of CO2 pipelines are crucial for the design of new CO2 pipelines and assessment of existing CO2 pipelines. The running ductile fracture is a severe failure mode of CO2 pipelines, whereby a rupture initiating at a defect (e.g. a corrosion anomaly or a stress corrosion crack) escalates into a running fracture along the longitudinal direction of the pipeline due to the sustained pressure from the escaping fluids. The primary objective of the proposed project is to develop a sophisticated yet computationally efficient numerical model to analyze the coupling effects between the crack propagation and fluid decompression during the running ductile fracture process of CO2 pipelines by capturing the physics underlying the fracture and decompression processes as well as the structure-fluid interaction between the two processes. The developed model will be an essential tool for the quantitative risk assessment and risk-based integrity management of CO2 pipelines. The proposed project will train two PhD students and one Master of Engineering Science student for one year. As Canada is striving to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, it is envisioned that a significant portion of Canada's current oil and gas pipeline networks (totaling more than 730,000 km long!) could be repurposed as CO2 pipelines in the next few decades. The proposed project provides the urgently needed decision support tools for assessing the suitability of repurposing existing pipelines, and will contribute to the sustained prosperity of Canada in a carbon neutral future.