Surfactant-Enhanced Treatment of Oil-Based Drill Cuttings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Surfactant-enhanced washing of oil-based drill cuttings was evaluated as a technology of benefit to domestic oil producers. Laboratory studies showed the branched C14-C15 alcohol propoxylate sulfate to be a promising surfactant for liberating oils from these drill cuttings. Low concentrations (∼0.1% by weight) of this surfactant produced ultra-low oil-water interfacial tensions (IFTs), thereby allowing the rollup/snap-off mechanisms to liberate drilling oil (C16, C18 alpha olefins) from the cuttings. Surfactant-enhanced washing was compared between oil-based drill cuttings, Canadian River Alluvium (CRA), and silica, showing that the hydrophobic nature of the oil-based cuttings limited the amount of oil removed. The Ca++ content of the cuttings promoted surfactant abstraction by the cuttings, thereby increasing the hydrophobicity and oil retention by the cuttings. For this reason, three components were added to produce a robust system: (1) branched C14-C15 alcohol propoxylate sulfate, (2) octyl-sulfobetaine, and (3) builder (Na2SiO3). The Na2SiO3 builder was added to promote Ca++ sequestration, thereby decreasing the Ca++ available for precipitating the surfactant. The octyl-sulfobetaine helps mitigate high hardness and high hydrophobicity by acting as a lime soap dispersing agent (LSDA). Surfactant losses were minimized and oil removal was maximized by using all three components. When washing with this three-component formulation, oil removal was relatively independent of operating conditions such as bath-cuttings contact time and agitation energy; minimizing the contact time and agitation has the added benefit of reducing the fines production during washing operations. When washing with the three-component formulation, the oil was liberated from the cuttings as a free phase layer, sans surfactant and sans solids. The final (post washing) oil content of oil-based cuttings was in the range of 2% to 5%, which is below treatment standards for these cuttings. In addition, greater than 85% of the initial branched C14-C15 alcohol propoxylate sulfate remained in the bath after washing, which minimizes the need for make-up surfactant when the wash water is reused.
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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".