Evaluation of a soybean oil derived surfactant in the development of oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion drilling mud for shale formation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.petrol.2022.110926Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    A natural surfactant was synthesized using edible (soybean) oil.

  • •

    Eco-friendly oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion muds were developed with soybean oil.

  • •

    The mud has excellent rheological & filtration properties with thermal stability.

  • •

    The developed mud has non-damaging properties toward shale formation.

Abstract

Drilling fluids having a few ecological footprints are extremely desirable, particularly for drilling in the highly complex shale formation zone. In the current work, an anionic surfactant was synthesized in the laboratory using soybean oil and characterized based on Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), thermal gravimetry analysis (TGA), and critical micelle concentration (CMC) value. The synthesized surfactant was used to formulate and stabilize environmentally-friendly oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion drilling muds, having soybean oil itself as a dispersed phase, for drilling shale formation. A comparative study on the rheological and filtration properties of soybean oil based emulsion mud systems and a conventional diesel oil based emulsion mud system, prepared in the presence of the synthesized surfactant, was also performed. The properties of soybean oil based emulsion mud systems were found to be superior to diesel oil based emulsion mud. The effect of varying oil content and mud additives (i.e., gum acacia or xanthan gum, and bentonite) on the rheological and filtration properties of drilling mud was also investigated in detail in order to achieve an optimum formulation. Considering the high-temperature application, the thermal stability of rheological and filtration properties of developed muds was investigated up to a temperature of 125 °C, and muds were found to be having excellent thermal stability. The developed emulsion mud systems were also found to be showing an excellent tolerance towards mud constituents like salt (KCL). The lubricity of the mud was evaluated, and it appeared that the soyabean oil based mud possesses an excellent lubricity compared to that of diesel oil based mud. The lubricity of the mud increases significantly with the increase in oil concentration. The shale recovery test and core flooding study, respectively, suggested a high shale recovery performance and low formation damage effect for the developed soybean oil-in-water emulsion mud system. The flow curve of developed emulsion muds depicted the excellent shear-thinning behavior, which is a desirable feature in drilling mud. The mud formulated with a composition of 80 vol% water, 20 vol% soybean oil, 0.3 wt% PAC-LVG, 0.4 wt% synthesized surfactant, 2.5 wt% bentonite, and 0.3 wt% gum acacia was found to be behaving as a Cross-model fluid.

Section snippets

Credit author statement

Vikas Mahto: Supervision, Project administration, Reviewing and Editing. Bhola Kumar Paswan: Conceptualization, Visualization, Investigation, Methodology, Writing and Original draft preparation. Shailesh Kumar: Formal analysis, Visualization, Data curation, Writing and Original draft preparation, Reviewing and Editing.

Materials

Gum acacia, xanthan gum, polyanionic cellulose-LVG (PAC-LVG), and petroleum ether were purchased from Chemical Drug House, India. Methanol (99.5%), potassium hydroxide (KOH) in pellet form, chlorosulfonic acid (98%), pyridine (99.5%), n-butanol (99.5%), concentrated H2SO4, Na2CO3 (99.5%), and NaHCO3 (99.7%) were purchased from the Loba Chemie Pvt. Ltd., India. Soybean oil was purchased from a local oil mill plant.

Procedure for the synthesis of soybean oil derived surfactant

The surfactant was synthesized from soybean oil in two steps – 1.

FT-IR analysis

The FT-IR spectra of soybean oil derived SOME and SODS, recorded within the range of 4000–500 cm−1 wavenumber, are shown in Fig. 3. Peak obtained at 2939 and 2915 cm−1 in the spectrum of SOME and SODS, respectively, suggests the symmetrical vibration of the aliphatic C–H in methylene and methyl (Kumar and Mahto, 2016). Whereas peaks observed at 1422, 1494, and 1385 cm−1 indicate the bending vibration of the aliphatic C–H. The peak observed at 1756 cm−1 in the spectrum of SOME shows the

Conclusions

This work developed environmental-friendly soybean oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion drilling muds for shale formation in the presence of a soybean oil derived surfactant (SODS) synthesized in the laboratory. The developed muds were found to have favorable rheological properties like gel strength, yield point, and plastic viscosity so as to allow the efficient capacity of holding/carrying drill cuttings during the drilling operation, and the fluid loss was also less so as to improve stability of

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to acknowledge the Indian institute of technology (Indian school of mines), Dhanbad, for providing financial assistance and necessary laboratory facilities for this work.

References (69)

  • Mohamed Khodja et al.

    Shale problems and water-based drilling fluid optimisation in the Hassi Messaoud Algerian oil field

    Appl. Clay Sci.

    (2010)
  • S. Kumar et al.

    Emulsification of Indian heavy crude oil in water for its efficient transportation through offshore pipelines

    Chem. Eng. Res. Des.

    (2016)
  • G.L.R. Leal et al.

    Formulation of novel ecofriendly microemulsion-based drilling fluids for improving rheological and filtration characteristics

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2022)
  • V. Mahto et al.

    Rheological study of a water based oil well drilling fluid

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2004)
  • M. Naik et al.

    Production of biodiesel from high free fatty acid Karanja (Pongamia pinnata) oil

    Biomass Bioenergy

    (2008)
  • R. Pal

    Slippage during the flow of emulsions in rheometers

    Colloids Surf. A Physicochem. Eng. Asp.

    (2000)
  • B.K. Paswan et al.

    Development of Jatropha oil-in-water emulsion drilling mud system

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2016)
  • B.K. Paswan et al.

    Development of environment-friendly oil-in-water emulsion based drilling fluid for shale gas formation using sunflower oil

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2020)
  • M.J. Scott et al.

    The biodegradation of surfactants in the environment

    Biochim. Biophys. Acta Biomembr.

    (2000)
  • A.A. Sulaimon et al.

    Performance enhancement of selected vegetable oil as base fluid for drilling HPHT formation

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2017)
  • R. Tiwari et al.

    Environmentally benign invert emulsion mud with optimized performance for shale drilling

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2020)
  • S.S. Vieira et al.

    Biodiesel production by free fatty acid esterification using lanthanum (La3+) and HZSM-5 based catalysts

    Bioresour. Technol.

    (2013)
  • J.K.M. William et al.

    Effect of CuO and ZnO nanofluids in xanthan gum on thermal, electrical and high pressure rheology of water-based drilling fluids

    J. Pet. Sci. Eng.

    (2014)
  • Z. Zhang et al.

    Effect of the variations of thermophysical properties of drilling fluids with temperature on wellbore temperature calculation during drilling

    Energy

    (2021)
  • M.I. Abdou et al.

    Effect of particle size of bentonite on rheological behavior of the drilling mud

    Petrol. Sci. Technol.

    (2011)
  • O.E. Agwu et al.

    Cost benefit analysis of vegetable oils used as alternatives to diesel in the formulation of oil-based drilling muds

  • Recommended Practice for Field Testing Water-Based Drilling Fluids

    (2017)

  • Rheology and Hydraulics of Oil-Well Drilling Fluids

    (2017)

  • Recommended Practice for Laboratory Testing of Drilling Fluids

    (2009)

  • Standard Test Method for Slake Durability of Shales and Similar Weak Rocks

    (2000)
  • A. Audibert et al.

    Role of polymers on formation damage

  • K. Babu et al.

    Synthesis and characterization of sodium methyl ester sulfonate for chemically-enhanced oil recovery

    Braz. J. Chem. Eng.

    (2015)
  • K. Babu et al.

    Synthesis and characterization of a new polymeric surfactant for chemical enhanced oil recovery

    Kor. J. Chem. Eng.

    (2016)

    • Cited by (6)

    View full text
    © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.