Drilling Mud for Oil Drilling

Drilling Mud for Oil Drilling

The biggest feature of rotary drilling is the use of drilling mud as the circulating fluid in the well. The earliest fluid used in drilling was "water". As far back as the ancient Egyptian era, Egyptians used water to remove rock cuttings when manually rotating the drill bit to drill a well hole 20 feet deep in a quarry. During the Zhou Dynasty in China (more than 1,100 years BC), water was also used to remove rock cuttings when drilling salt wells in some areas. Water can be said to be the earliest "mud" used for drilling. Until now, water is still the main component of mud. Especially in low-density drilling mud, water accounts for more than 85% of the total composition.

With the development of the oil well drilling industry, drilling is also going deeper. In addition to the important task of removing rock cuttings, drillingmud must have many other functions to complete the drilling operations of deep wells and difficult wells.

Drilling MudDrilling Mud can not only clean the wellbore, cool the drill bit, circulate the drilled cuttings, and increase the drilling rate, but also form a mud wall on the inner wall of the wellbore to temporarily protect the wellbore and make it less likely to collapse. If barite powder is added to the mud, the specific gravity of the mud can be increased to resist the pressure of the formation to prevent collapse and prevent the formation fluid from invading the wellbore. In case of a leaking mud layer, plugging materials can also be added to the mud to stabilize the wellbore; and the viscosity of the mud can suspend the drill cuttings so that the wellbore will not be buried, so the drilling mud has many functions. The importance of mud to drilling is like blood to the human body, which will directly affect the success or failure of the drilling project. Therefore, how to strike a balance among the various properties of the drilling mud and choose the appropriate drillingmud is the biggest test for the on-site team leader and mud personnel of the engineering team.