Surfactant-Enhanced Treatment of Oil-Based Drill Cuttings
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it