“…To deal with the possible damages caused by water, chemical inhibitors are added to the fluid formulation in order to minimize or even prevent the shale crystalline destruction. The literature reports the use of inorganic salts, such as KCl, and CaCl 2 , water soluble silicates (Gomez and Patel, 2013), cationic hydrophobized polysaccharides (Lopes et al, 2014), ionic liquids (Berry et al, 2009), poly(oxyalkyl)amines (Qu et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2011), poly(oxypropylene)amidoamine (Zhong et al, 2012), others amine derivatives (Patel et al, 2007;Zhong et al, 2015aZhong et al, , 2015b and nonionic molecules/polymers (Shadizadeh et al, 2015), all of them presenting advantages and disadvantages. Regarding the environmental requirements for the drilling fluid formulation, amine derivatives such as quaternary alkyl ammonium salts or amine containing polymers are highly efficient shale inhibitors, but present elevated toxicity.…”