Application of nanomaterials to enhanced the lubricity and rheological properties of water based drilling fluid

Abstract

The ever-growing demand of petroleum resources lead to depletion of easily accessible reservoirs. To meet the petroleum demands, exploration of challenging reservoirs must be taken up. This can be done by drilling deviated, horizontal and deeper well with high pressure and high temperature reservoirs. However, such drilling leads to harsh drilling circumstances such as torque and drag. These circumstances can be overcome by adding appropriate amount of nanomaterials to reduce drilling problems such as pipe sticking, thermal instability, torque and drag. This paper emphasis and investigates the usage of lubrication behaviour of drilling fluids by adding multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) and graphene nano-platelets (GNP) to reduce coefficient of friction of water based drilling fluid. Experiments were conducted to study the characteristics of added nanoparticles on drilling fluid, where by analysing the rheological properties, filtrate loss fluid and lubricity. The results showed that the addition of MWCNT at 0.01 ppb and 0.02 ppb of GNP gave torque lubricity reduction between 38 to 59%. The comprehensive nanomaterial behaviour in water based drilling fluid favoured the enhancement of drilling fluid lubricity and marginally improved the drilling fluid rheological properties such as plastic viscosity, yield point and filtrate loss of drilling fluid.