Performance of Conventional Drilling Fluids and Nano Based Drilling Fluids

Abstract

The world’s energy demand is about to increase over 60% in next 30 years. Several mature fields are nearly in depleting conditions. The oil and gas industry is striving to seek advance methods for the recovery of the remaining hydrocarbons which are difficult to produce using conventional recovery methods. Drilling is the only way which provides a path to produce the hydrocarbons from subsurface. During drilling operations, oil and gas industry faces several problems including borehole instability, torque and drag, sticking, bit balling and issues due to high pressure high temperature (HPHT) environment etc. These challenges can only be minimized using a suitable drilling fluid system, composed of Nano-scale particles for turning the behavior of the rheological properties of drilling fluid to ensure safe drilling and production operations. Nano-scale particles are usually very ultra-fine materials, whose size ranges between the size of atom and ordinary micro-scale particles having high specific surface area of interaction. The nano-scale particles used as anadditive which exhibit strong potential inhibition both internally and externally. Due to the high specific surface area of nano sized particles, these fluids need very low concentration of the additives used. This paper depicts the potential challenging problems encountered during drilling activity. It is also compared that how nano based smart fluids can overcome the drilling problems by improving drilling fluids properties like viscosity, density, and filtration properties etc.