Drilling Fluid Management & Disposal
Drilling fluid waste management and solids control of drilling mud related technical and developed situation.
Onshore disposal options aim at incorporating drilling waste into either the surface (or rooting zone) or beneath the rooting zone. The former is
called land application. The latter is called burial.
Continue reading “ONSHORE DISPOSAL OPTIONS”
The dilution required to compensate for the incorporation of 37.9 bbl of drilled solids was the 759 bbl of new mud, less the volume of the drilled solids in the new drilling fluid built, or 721 bbl. This is 19 bbl of dilution per bbl of incorporated solids (721.0 bbl / 37.9 bbl). The calculation for the dilution, that is, the volume of new mud that must be prepared, is
Continue reading “CALCULATING THE DILUTION QUANTITY”
Assume that the surface system contains 1000 bbl of drilling fluid, the targeted drilled-solids level is 4%vol, and 100 bbl of drilled solids report to the surface. For reference, 100 bbl is the volume of 1029 feet of a 10-inch-diameter hole.
Continue reading “EFFECT OF SOLIDS REMOVAL SYSTEM PERFORMANCE”
As oil well drilling encountered more and more difficult conditions, hole problems finally became undeniably associated with excessive drilled solids. Many years ago, a controversy raged concerning the effect of drilled solids on the cost of a well. Many thought that drilled solids were beneficial as an inexpensive substitute for weighting agents. Frequently, production horizons near the surface were normally pressured and could be drilled with unweighted drilling fluids. Usually, these drilling conditions were relatively trouble free, and a poor-quality drilling fluid was used for drilling. Of course, drilling performances and well productivity could be enhanced with better-quality drilling fluids, but those effects were difficult to quantify. As these areas graduated from unweighted drilling fluids to weighted drilling fluids, better drillingfluid properties were required to prevent trouble. The primary problem was that large quantities of drilled solids were intolerable. The drilling trouble costs could easily be traced to failure to limit drilled-solids concentration. This provided the impetus for most drilling rigs to upgrade their surface systems handling drilling fluids. The benefits of a clean drilling fluid have been well stated in previous chapters and have been well validated.
Continue reading “REASONS FOR DRILLED-SOLIDS REMOVAL”
