84 / 2016-06-15 04:15:31

APPLICATION OF CORN OIL AS THE BASE FLUID FOR THE FORMULATION OF A POLLUTION-FREE OIL BASED DRILLING FLUID

synthetic oil-based mud, ,vegetable oil,1249,pollution-free

Oil-based drilling fluid or mud (OBM) is a mud having petroleum product such as diesel fuel as the base fluid. OBM have been in use for several decades and offer several advantages over water-based drilling fluids or muds (WBM), including stabilization of formation clays, potentially less formation damage, and the ability to handle very low and very high temperatures. On the other hand, Use of OBM for drilling has its drawbacks, including high initial cost, severe water contaminant, low rate of penetration, and most importantly, it is not environmental friendly particularly on the marine environment in offshore application. Therefore, many industries have been replacing the high aromatic oils with lower one (synthetic oil). One of the alternative synthetic oil which can be used as the basic material of OBM is vegetable oil. The vegetable oil with its characteristics, biodegradable, low toxicity and environmental friendly, is potential as oil based-mud in drilling system.
This study describes the laboratory formulation of the non-toxic, natural vegetable oil-based drilling system. The use of two different diluents, an olefin and ester has been demonstrated to perform as viscosity reducer and copolymer was applied to control of fluid loss.
The results indicated that the oil-based drilling fluid can be substituted by this new formulated synthetic fluid. The advantages of this fluid can be low or non-toxicity, biodegradability and thermal stability under high temperature conditions. In addition the used vegetable-based drilling mud, can be safely discharged into the ocean without harming the eco-system.