Environment friendly fluid loss additives to protect the marine environment from the detrimental effect of mud additives

The exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbon from the ocean dictate the use of environment friendly muds and mud additives to protect the existing wealths such as fishes, coastal areas and other habitats of the ocean. Hence, the preservation of the Australian as well as global ocean environments from the detrimental effects of muds and mud additives dictates the design of better environment friendly drilling mud systems using mud additives having no/negligible environmental impact. This paper describes the fluid loss characteristics of several starches and provides a comparative assessment with respect to a widely used modified starch. Experimental results indicate that some of the starches have static and dynamic fluid loss characteristics similar to or better than those of a widely used modified starch used by the mud industry. The static fluid loss properties measured after thermal treatment at different temperatures indicate that the newly developed starch products can be used as fluid loss additives for drilling boreholes having bottom hole temperature up to 150 degrees C. The products developed by gelatinization using a reactive extrusion technique have negligible impurities, need no solvent during gelatinization, produce no waste water as a by-product and thus are suitable for environment sensitive areas. The products have been developed from local resources and have lower manufacturing cost and thus expected to decrease the cost of drilling mud significantly. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.