Preparation and Evaluation of Some Water/Oil Emulsifiers for Oil-Based Drilling Fluids

Abstract

The concept of drilling fluids or muds are generally used in drilling wells to perform many functions and get successful drilling operations especially drilling by the rotary method, it is necessary to use a drilling mud that lubricates the drilling system, carries the cuttings to the surface of the well and do many other functions to get a successful drilling operation. With the highly need worldwide demand for oil and with the fact that the oil and gas resources are becoming deeper with extreme conditions from pressure and temperature, the drilling operations play an important role to increase the production from the hydrocarbon reservoirs. Invert emulsion oil-based mud is one of the most important fluids used in off-shore and on-shore drilling operations for oil and reservoirs. The main component of invert emulsion oil-based mud is emulsifiers so, the main challenge is to synthesize new emulsifiers for the preparation of w/o emulsions with high performance in high pressure-high temperature wells. Emulsifiers are a type of surfactant; these surface agent materials are used to lower the interfacial tension (IFT) values between water and oil phases to form the emulsion. When emulsifiers, water, and oil are mixed they form a thermodynamically stable phase called emulsion which can be characterized by interfacial tension methods and the ability to solubilize both aqueous and oil compounds. In recent years, a considerable increase in studies on colloidal systems has been observed, due to growing demand in several industrial sectors, particularly those associated with the development of new emulsifiers stable at high-pressure/high-temperature conditions. There are many factors very important when choosing the suitable drilling mud these factors include:

Impacts of this work

Operational impact: • Invert emulsion oil-based mud should have excellent rheological properties especially at high pressure and high temperature so, the invert emulsion oil-based mud has preferred usage over high diesel oil content oil-based mud and water-based mud.