Improving Hole Cleaning Efficiency using Nanosilica in Water-Based Drilling Mud

Abstract

Inadequate wellbore cleaning contributes to several major drilling problems such as; increase in torque and drag that can limit the reach to target, mechanical pipe sticking, difficulties in casing and cementing and logging operations that can increase well cost significantly. Meanwhile, effective removal of drilled cuttings from the wellbore improves penetration rate and drilling efficiency. Herein, water-based mud was formulated with nanosilica to enhance cuttings and solid particles transport from the wellbore to the surface. Four different weight percent concentrations of nanosilica (0.001, 0.003, 0.005 and 0.01 wt.%) at three different flow rates in litres/seconds (0.4, 0.6 and 1.0) and cutting size (small, medium and large) were used to investigate the formulated water-based mud lifting capacity of the drilled cuttings and other solid particles. Thereafter, the hole cleaning efficiency of the water-based mud containing nanosilica was compared to conventional water-based mud. The results show that nanosilica water-based mud influences the cuttings lifting capacity. The addition of the nanosilica concentrations to the water-based mud enhances the viscosity, thereby increasing the muds carrying and circulating capacity. Moreover, nanosilica water-based mud displays mud stability that will stabilize the wellbore and prevent the intrusion of formation fluids into it when compared with the conventinal water-based mud. The effect of cuttings size on the wellbore cleaning is minimal. The large cuttings size shows a lower degree of cuttings transportation compared with the small and medium cutting size. The small cuttings size has higher cuttings recovery to the surface. Finally, though increase in flowrate leads to more cuttings recovery, there is every tendency that much fluid flow rate will cause an increase in frictional pressure losses and equivalent circulating density, high pump pressure requirement and potential hole erosion.

Experimental investigation of the effect of henna leaf extracts on cuttings transportation in highly deviated and horizontal wells

“…Lower volumes of drilling cuttings and solids offer faster penetration rate due to less resistance to fluid flow beneath the bit. Nonetheless, the PV should not be too low so that the drilled cuttings and other solids lifting from the hole to the surface will be possible (Gbadamosi et al 2018b;Piroozian et al 2012). After heating the mud systems at 150 °F for 16 h, the PV of the bentonite bearing mud sample was slightly decreased with about 6.8%, while that of HLE bearing mud sample was decreased by only 1.54%, indicating a better thermal stability of HLE over bentonite.…”

“…Based on this result, HWBM mud sample has better filtration control properties than BWBM at both API and HPHT conditions, and this property is desirable for drilling purposes as it could prevent stuck pipe incidents. The effect of a thick mud cake is that it reduces the effective diameter of the drilled wellbore, thereby increasing the area of contact between the drill pipe and the cake leading to greater risk of stuck pipe incidents (Gbadamosi et al 2018b;Luz et al 2017). Figure 14 shows the coefficient of friction (CoF) for the mud samples before and after thermal aging.…”

“…Decreased fluid velocity at the low side of the wall have been reported in numerous literatures to be the main cause of poor cuttings transportation with increasing hole-angle (Duan et al 2008;Ismail et al 2016;Ford et al 1990;Gavignet and Sobey 1989;Onuoha et al 2015). Gbadamosi et al (2018b), Hakim et al (2018), Elochukwu et al (2017), Afolabi et al (2017), Ismail et al (2016) and Piroozian et al (2012) all reported that the rheological and filtration properties of drilling fluids have significant contributions in determining the effectiveness of cuttings transportation. The rheological properties are often optimized to ensure that drilling fluid can function effectively and yet lessen the drilling cost.…”

An overview of chemical enhanced oil recovery: recent advances and prospects

“…The application of this functional materials requires a base fluid such as gas, oil, water, or any other suitable liquid substance, hence, they are termed nanofluid. The application of nanotechnology has proffered solutions to various oil and gas problems ranging from drilling operations, petroleum exploration, inhibiting asphaltene depositions and gas hydrate formations, hydraulic fracturing jobs and EOR [24][25][26][27].…”

Application of nano water-based drilling fluid in improving hole cleaning

“…Several researchers have studied the effect of improving the drilling fluid rheology utilizing different drilling fluid additives on enhancing hole cleaning [1][2][3][4]. The effect of adding nanoparticles (NPs) to drilling fluids to improve the rheological properties have been recently investigated [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. A summary of the used nanoparticles along with the improved parameters is shown in Table 1.…”