Drilling fluid additives play an extremely crucial role when it comes to determining a well’s success or its failure. It has become more important than ever to find new ways when it comes to the improvement of drilling fluids additives. This is primarily because the drilling industry as a whole has a massive demand for spreading into more challenging terrain for drilling purposes.
Let us look at a few steps that can help ensure that you can improve your drilling muds.
Restricting Pressure
When it comes to high pressure, high-temperature drilling, the biggest problem that is faced by construction workers is the narrow window that exists between fracture gradients and pore pressure.
In these situations, it is ideal to try to lessen the additional pressure that is generally exerted on the well. One of the easiest ways to make this happen, when it comes to drilling muds is the usage of low rheology fluid. This thin fluid is a drilling fluid additive that helps create an extremely low amount of pressure for the good bore. Most HPHT fluids, tend to be a high-density fluid in order to support the solids that are added in. This tends to draw most construction workers away from using thin fluids as that support will not be provided. An experienced construction worker needs to find the perfect balance between low-pressure fluids while avoiding the additional dangers that come with poor slide support.
Common Stability
A common problem with drilling fluids additives is that their thermal stability tends to make the entire process of drilling a much more complicated endeavour. In these cases, the construction workers must have a deep understanding of the effects on the drilling fluids additives that come hand in hand with pressure profiles and temperatures of the well. One thing to keep in mind is that high pressure, high temperature wells require a significantly higher amount of effort and time to keep the drilling muds in the best conditions. The drilling muds cannot be changed rapidly so prioritising and understanding thermal stability is of utmost importance.
Extreme Conditions
When choosing any kind of boiling mud or drilling fluid additives, the first thing a construction worker needs to keep in mind is whether they will be capable of maintaining stability for the maximum amount of time in the worst possible conditions. This essentially means that in order to get maximum performance from your drilling muds, you need to calculate the highest amount of time that the drilling muds are expected to work for you and ensure that they are capable of working for that long in the most extreme conditions. Though these conditions will not be commonplace having a fluid that can manage this beforehand makes it much easier to handle any complications should the drilling mud start to break down thermally. In these situations, there are a significant number of new elements that are added to the system, which can cause certain chemical reactions that can have unexpected and adverse reactions on the drilling process as a whole.