Environmentally-acceptable Replacement of 2-Butoxyethanol: A High Performance Alternative for Fracturing Applications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper concerns the development and implementation of a replacement chemistry for 2-butoxyethanol used in fracturing. The new product was synthesized to provide mutual solvency, wettability modification and clay swelling inhibition. Recently, 2-butoxyethanol has come under scrutiny in North America (e.g. prompting Environment and Health Canada to add it to Schedule 1 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act). Precautions need to be taken when working with 2-butoxyethanol due to toxicity concerns. Exposure to high levels has led to reported nose and eye irritation, headaches and vomiting. Introduction of an alternate product has had a profound effect on the stimulation market in Canada. So far, 400,000 kg of the alternative product has replaced an estimated annual usage total of 3 to 4 million kg of 2- butoxyethanol. The new product also has had successful applications in the US, Latin America and Europe. There has been a significant environmental impact already realized through the use of this alternative product, and there is even greater unrealized potential. Additionally, as a non-regulated product for use and handling, the safety and material handling implications are greatly improved. This paper details the chemistry of the replacement product, as well as environmental information to support the use of this product as a benign replacement for 2-butoxyethanol. An in-depth description of the laboratory testing used to identify, evaluate and select the appropriate treatment parameters also is given. The paper concludes with two case histories from northeast Alberta where this product was successfully used as part of a fracture treatment for long, horizontal, multi-zone shale gas plays. Furthermore comparisons are made using 2-butoxyethanol and no mutual solvent chemistry in a fracture treatment. This data shows the clear benefit of using this new chemistry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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) | 0.007 | 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 teacher head, 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".