Oxidation as a Rheology Modifier and a Potential Cause of Explosions in Oiland Synthetic-Based Drilling Fluids
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In drilling directional and horizontal wells, the oil and synthetic-based drilling fluids are required to exhibit high viscosity at low shear rates to properly suspend the weighting materials and drilling cuttings and to prevent sag and settling of weighting materials. This can be achieved by employing different rheology modifiers such as dimeric and trimeric fatty acids, imidazolines, amides, and synthetic polymers. Moreover, the safety of the drilling operation has been one of the main concerns of drilling companies.Since oil and synthetic-based drilling muds are widely used in high pressure high temperature wells, a set of drilling fluids commonly used in Western Canada were examined to study the effect of long exposure of the drilling mud with air. They consist of three oil base liquids (Diesel, Drillsol, and Distillate) and one synthetic base liquid (Envirodrill) together with water scavengers, viscosifiers, wetting materials, fluid loss controllers, and weighting materials. The drilling fluids were aged in stationary reactors in the presence of one charge of air for 52 hours at 150°C and 13.5 MPa initial pressure.This paper presents the results related to changes in rheological properties and occurrence of explosion in the drilling fluids employed. The results at different shear rates, ranging from ultra low shear rates to high shear rates, are presented. It is shown that the aged drilling fluid systems exhibited a tremendous increase in viscosity at ultra-low shear rates and relatively low increases at medium and high shear rates. Furthermore, the amounts of solids precipitated in the base liquids were correlated with the mononuclear aromatics content. While rapid heat releases or explosions in the synthetic-based drilling fluids were observed with 0.5 – 1.6 hours induction delay times with gradual increase in liquid phase temperature, oil-based systems were safe under the conditions tested.These experimental results imply that oxidation serves as a rheology modifier and induction delay time can be used as a warning parameter for an impeding explosion. Moreover, the impact of each chemical on the extent of increasing the viscosity and the occurrence of explosion is given.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 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".