Studies on Less Expansive Environmentally Safe Polymers for Development of Water-Based Drilling Fluids

Abstract

Abstract Recently there has been lot of interest and research activity started in the development of new products and combinations for the development of ecofriendly drilling fluids using chemicals, which are less toxic and biodegradable materials. In this work, an attempt has been made to develop water based drilling fluids using Indian bentonite clays and new ecofriendly polymers, which has been found to be cheaper than the conventional polymers used in oil well industry. The tamarind gum and tragacanth gum, which are not used in water based drilling fluids, had been found suitable. This has been confirmed by doing experiments using standard procedure adopted by oil industry. The temperature stability of drilling fluid additives was studied using Hot Air Rolling Oven and Aging Cells. The formation damage was carried out using oil field core samples on Ruska liquid permeameter. The laboratory investigation furnishes that combinations of these polymers and bentonite have favorable rheogical properties with less formation damage.