Experimental study of Zubair shale stability of east Baghdad oil field using different additives in water based mud

Abstract

Shale formation is represented as one of the challenge formations during drilling wells because it is a strong potential for wellbore instability. Zubair formation in Iraqi oil fields (East Baghdad) is located at a depth from 3044.3 to 3444 m. It is considered as one of the most problematic formations through drilling wells in East Baghdad. Most problems of Zubair shale are swelling, sloughing, caving, cementing problem and casing landing problem caused by the interaction of drilling fluid with the formation. An attempt to solve the cause of these problems has been adapted in this paper by enhancing the shale stability through adding additives to the drilling fluid. The study includes experiments by using two types of drilling fluids, API and polymer type, with five types of additives (KCl, NaCl, CaCl2, Na2SiO3 and Flodrill PAM 1040) in different concentrations (0.5, 1, 5 and 10) wt% and different immersion period (1, 24 and 72 h) hours. The effect of drilling fluids and additive salts on shale has been studied by using different techniques: (XRD, XRF, reflected and transmitted microscope) as well shale recovery. The results show that adding 10 wt% of Na2SiO3 to API drilling fluid results in a high percentage of shale recovery (78.22%), while the maximum shale recovery was (80.57%) in polymer drilling fluid type gained by adding 10 wt% of Na2SiO3.