Severe corrosion damage may occur when gas transmission pipelines are exposed to groundwaters containing sulphide and/or oxygen. In order to better understand Fe-S chemistry a series of five long term corrosion experiments were conducted on carbon steel in solutions containing sodium sulphide. This paper characterizes the effects of the exposure environment on untreated and pretreated steel specimens exposed to with various redox conditions and HS– concentrations. The highest corrosion rates were observed when both sulphide and oxygen were present. Under anaerobic conditions corrosion rates were lower for untreated steel than for pre-oxidized steel exposed to sulphide. This suggests pre-oxidization of the steel surface prevents passivation in the presence of sulphide. When sulphide was present Raman analysis suggested that the iron sulphide phase mackinawite (Fe1+xS) is dominant under anaerobic conditions. However mackinawite is not protective in the presence of oxygen and converts to iron(III) oxy-hydroxides when conditions are made more oxidizing.