Low carbon martensitic stainless steels are to be considered as a less expensive pipeline material in North Sea oil and gas production. Although it is generally accepted that the failure mechanism for such materials in sour service is hydrogen assisted cracking, nearly no hydrogen permeation data are existing up to the present. Thus, hydrogen transport in a typical low carbon martensitic stainless steel has been investigated in the delivered and also in the quenched condition at free corrosion in the NACE TM 0177-96 standard solution saturated with H2S up to various levels. As a result, it turned out that the diffusion coefficient in the quenched condition is by the factor five higher than in the state as delivered, but the subsurface concentration is being decreased by an order of a magnitude. Such diffusion data represent valuable input parameters for modelling hydrogen assisted cracking and for life time
prediction of martensitic stainless steel pipelines. Keywords: hydrogen, low carbon martensitic stainless steel, diffusion coefficient, subsurface
concentration, free corrosion