Mitigation of formation damage by designing a novel nanoparticles mud

Author's Department

Petroleum & Energy Engineering Department

Document Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Oil Gas European Magazine

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Abstract

Formation damage is caused by the invasion of foreign fluids and/or solids into the exposed section adjacent to the wellbore. Generally, the drilling mud is the main source of such contaminants. The mud column pressure must exceed that of the formation. Hence the mud filtrate flows radially outward and interacts with the formation contents. Because of the complex nature of interactions, effective resolution of damage problems requires the combined efforts of engineers, geologists, and laboratory personnel to design anew version of mud to mitigate the damage. The article presents a way to mitigate the formation damage due to drilling operation by designing a new nano drilling mud, which has the ability to minimize the mud filtrates. Three different sizes of silica nanoparticles are used in conducting these experiments. Further experiments are conducted on the optimum size to investigate the optimum concentration. Of course these results were compared with an industry standard polymer-based fluid loss additive. The changes in rheological properties of the mud are also studied along with the fluid loss values. Finally, it is found that using any of the nano silica sizes under study is better than using polymer-based mud. The optimum nano size is 5-15 nm (size 1). The most economic and yet effective concentration of nanoparticles is the range between 0.27 and 0.40% wt/wt, which leads to a 56% reduction in fluid loss in comparison with the base fluid. © 2014 URBAN-VERLAG Hamburg/Wien GmbH.

First Page

104

Last Page

109

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