A Novel Potassium Silicate for Use in Drilling Fluids Targeting Unconventional Hydrocarbons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The challenging nature of drilling and producing shale gas plays has favored the use of oil-based drilling fluids. The growing importance of shale gas has placed greater pressure to address environmental issues associated with the drilling and production of these wells. A pressing goal is the development of a highly inhibitive and environmentally friendly water-based drilling fluid. Specifically, the drilling fluid should address wellbore stability issues associated with specific shale gas plays. Such specialized drilling fluids will better stabilize shales and help control drill time and costs. This paper discusses the research and development of a novel potassium silicate as a shale stabilizer for certain shale gas plays. This novel potassium silicate differs from conventional potassium silicate by significantly increasing the level of dissolved silicate to potassium. The resulting potassium silicate is chemically more reactive and can more easily undergo the polymerization and precipitation reaction. These reactions are the shale stabilization mechanisms most often associated with sodium and potassium silicate. Laboratory investigation indicates drilling fluids formulated with this more vitreous potassium silicate show a high degree of effectiveness at preventing shale delamination and sealing micro fractures. Drilling fluids formulated with conventional potassium silicate can often be disposed using surface methods such as mix-bury-cover, land spreading or land spraying. However, depending on receiving soil or the concentration of potassium silicate in the drilling fluid, it sometimes becomes necessary to treat the associated drill waste with a calcium-based amendment or send the waste to an approved waste management facility. The reduced alkalinity and more siliceous nature of high ratio potassium silicates provides for a drilling fluid with lower salinity as measured by electrical conductivity and sodium adsorption ratio. Resulting drill waste can more easily meet the salinity requirements associated with using surface disposal methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".