TEREGA, as a committed actor and one of the co-founders of the European Hydrogen Backbone project, intends to adopt a proactive approach and accelerate hydrogen’s deployment. This takes the form of a 53,000 km pipeline network and linking 28 countries by 2040. Due to its strategic geographical position, TEREGA has a particular contribution to make to the development of that section of the Backbone, which is in the south-west of Europe and France, through several infrastructure projects.

This paper describes the project of a natural gas (NG) pipeline conversion into Hydrogen (H2) near Bordeaux as an inevitable joint effort of TEREGA and a pipeline integrity assessment service provider.

This project serves as a pilot for TEREGA to prove the robustness of its conversion protocol including its crack susceptibility model. It will help TEREGA to enter into the Hydrogen service in the safest possible way.

Aspects of making a challenging pipeline passable for an inline inspection service are addressed. The latest generation of UltraSonic inline inspection Wall Measurement (WM) and axial & circumferential Crack Detection (CD) tools of Dexon Technology demonstrated reduced uncertainties in the engineering criticality assessment. The development of the high-resolution CD tool and its benefits of supporting a more accurate integrity assessment with a time-based depth sizing method [1] in combination with metal loss, geometry and hydrostatic test data provides a holistic approach of concluding hydrogen readiness of a pipeline. With both quantitative and qualitative data set improvements, it is possible for the operator to allocate effort and financial resources more efficiently, to achieve an accelerated transition towards a hydrogen network.

[1] Innovative and Accurate Time-Based Crack Sizing ILI Tool for Greater Pipeline Reliability, 
ptc 2024, Joseph Krynicki, Levi Porter, Ken Nikitin, Gus Gonzalez, Lujian Peng