Novel Eco-friendly Additives for Aqueous and Non-aqueous Fluid Design

Abstract

The global oil and gas industry has a long standing initiative to develop and use the most environment friendly solutions in the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources to prevent any damage or degradation of other marine and terrestrial resources. This is reflected by increasing research in academics, research institutes and organizations around the globe to develop better and more environment friendly base fluids, viscosifiers, fluid loss additives, emulsifiers, lubricants, etc. to protect the local, regional and global environments, eco-systems, habitats and also the OHS of workers and professionals working in the oil and gas industry. This paper describes the development, testing and evaluation of several novel additives to demonstrate their suitability for oil and gas field applications to avoid any negative impact to the surrounding environment. Experimental results indicate that the newly developed additives provide desirable, similar or better performance with respect to conventional additives used by the industry and thus demonstrate their suitability for application in aqueous and non-aqueous fluid design. The plant-based organic additive identified to use as an ecofriendly viscosifier for aqueous mud system can also control the fluid loss behavior of clay free system and thus can act as a bi-functional additive. Several waste vegetable oil-based eco-friendly additives have been developed for their application as spotting fluids, base oil and emulsifiers for invert emulsion oil based mud. These additives have similar or better technical performance than the equivalents and the eco-friendly nature of the mud additives demonstrates their ability to perform the functional tasks with better protection of the surrounding environments.