Re "guessing": So I guess hydrogen embrittlement doesn't happen as the gas is long gone?  I guess guessing is not a good way to know.

Something doesn't have to kill you to still be a bad idea. Shoot there have been times when I wished some things would just kill me and get it over with---GI disturbance in Jakarta comes to mind...I've had several friends not die from metal fume fever and only 1 who died from complications of it.  However the survivors strongly maintain that one should avoid it!

I was a geologist/mudlogger on a surface to basement core job in Texas once and one of my tasks was testing the Hydrogen Sulfide alarm. The training that dealt with it was not very amusing and I decided to stay on the side of being excessively safe than ever having to worry. YMMV!

Hydrogen embrittlement happens because the gas gets dissolved in the molten steel of the weld puddle. That's not quite the same as the steel being exposed to hydrogen sulfide at significantly subcritical temperatures. Is sufficient H2S absorbed into the steel to pose a threat to health and safety when later heated?

The point being that if you are guessing without proper background you are not likely to have good guesses and so err on the side of caution---please!   May people do not know that metals can absorb gasses; forging Ti is a good example of a tough metal getting brittle during forging. Or release gasses and elements when heated---welders developing parkinsonian symptoms from exposure to Manganese for instance.

Sulfide cracking is a big problem in sour gas wells; so absorption to some extent does seem to be taking place.  Also rods may come out "gunky" and who knows what's in that "vaseline from the inferno".    When placed in a forge I would worry that Sulfur Dioxide might get generated, also  a toxic gas.

There is a NCBI case, PMC2850187, about a person just exposed while welding at an oil refinery as an example of what H2S does to folks even when not at fatal levels.   (OSHA also discusses H2S exposure)

Great read Thomas, brings back memories of working for a pipe inspection outfit on the slope.  Once in a while we'd get a wiff drifting casing. The classes were almost as scary as the films. 

BAAAAD stuff.

Frosty The Lucky.

Thank you for the information Thomas. I have a lot of sucker rod, but I haven't tried forging any of it yet. I'm afraid my little anvil might not be able to take it. We got a bunch of stuff one time from a neighbor who moved out, and he had a pile of branding irons made from it. 

And most sucker rod will not have been exposed to H2S; but if you are in a sour gas region, just take a little more care.

One of the problems with H2S is a "whiff" may be all you get as it deadens the nose so you don't keep smelling it. So was that a whiff or are you in possibly deadly quantities of it??????   Trying to make training films that will impress the average roughneck enough to pay attention and take precautions tends to make them a bit on the rough side---rather like some of the army/navy training films about social diseases from the 40's and 50's...

Not guessing, Thomas. Guessing would be me saying you have between 400 and 500 USD in your pocket at the moment.  And even that wouldn’t be a guess.  It would be a stereotype.

What I am saying is all the posts I have read saying sour well rods are dangerous have said so using roughly the same sort of language they would have used when speaking about welding or forging galvanized steel. And that just doesn’t make sense. Perhaps if the rods had just been pulled from the well and were still covered in gunk, but they never are around here. 

Around here they all look like this. 

The closest to newish looking I could find online were some from Texas and even they didn’t look all that gunky. 

H2S is without a doubt dangerous stuff. If you can smell it, you are probably going to be feeling pretty sick. If you can’t and it is there, the concentration is likely high enough to kill your sense of smell. You will quickly feel dizzy and will almost certainly within 30 minutes or so.

You mentioned on another site that rods used in sour gas wells are a different alloy. I assume this is because H2S is corrosive?  (Not a guess. It is an assumption, based upon my knowing H2S is corrosive and different alloys being more resistant corrosion than others. ) Are these marked so they can be identified?

Wow laid off diabetics with no health insurance carry US$400 to US$600 in their pockets around where you are at?  I should move! Things have changed since I was laid off in OKC during the bust of the early 1980's.

Well I did say it was a stereotype.

Most of my uncles, cousins, and kids I went to school with worked in the oilfield in one capacity or another. Rough life. When it is good, it is very dang good. When it is bad, it is worse than bad. There seems to be no middle way. And almost to a man, during the boom times they live like the bust is never going to happen again, but it does. 

I resolved very early on to do anything but work in the oil patch. 

I grew up on boom/bust stories as my Mother was born on the kitchen table on a farm near Altus. So when I was working in the Patch I saved like crazy and when the bust hit; I was able to spend a year working for a swordmaker for no pay---except 2 meals a day with his family. (Then got married and had to support a family.)