As a drilling mud management system and equipments manufacturer,we not only supply drilling mud equipments but also offer free design service for drillling mud management system.
Problems encountered by the earlier drillers in the oilfield heavy oil wells drillling include:
•Shaker screen blinding by the viscous, heavy oil that leads to high mud losses over the shakers and the requirement to run coarse screens (20 to 40 mesh) on the shakers. Prescreening with scalping shakers did not help appreciably. In most cases both sets of
screens would blind with the sticky oil. The screen blinding problem was fought by spraying the screens with mineral or synthetic oil, but mainly coarse screens were being run.
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•The use of the coarse screens increases the load on downstream solids removal equipment (desanders and desilters) and can lead to cone overloading, rope discharge from the cones and inefficient cone operation. Poor cone performance can make it difficult to control mud weights and result in high dilution rates and increased waste volumes.
•Since the normal rig used a stationary mud processing system, mud is transferred from the
shaker tank to the mud processing system with centrifugal pumps. Problems encountered with this approach included: maintaining prime on the transfer pumps due to the gas content of the mud and wear on the pumps due to cavitation and the high sand loading in the fluid.
•Although gas cut mud was often encountered, attempts to use degassers usually failed due to plugging with the sticky heavy oil and the high sand loading. Degassers were generally not used by the other Faja operators.
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•Differential sticking is at times a problem in the long productive sand intervals drilled.Maintaining a low mud weight is critical.
•Rates of penetration (ROP) can be quite high in the sands. In order to maintain directional control, theinstantaneous ROPs can be greater than 2000 feet per hour. The mud system and the mud handling and solids removal equipment should be capable of handling solids generated at those high rates that may arrive at the surface as slugs of heavily sand laden mud.
•High dilution rates can result in high trucking costs and logistical problems when handling waste mud and solids at a central site.
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Mud Equipment / Waste Management System Design
The first rig on the Hamaca project was to be a newly built rig, which offered the rare opportunity to design and build a rig mud system from the ground up.The rig selected was a Precision Drilling pad rig that includes a mud system designed such that the entire
mud processing system moves on roller mats as the rig is moved This eliminates the necessity to move sand-laden mud from the shaker tank (that moves along with the pad rig) to stationary mud processing pits. As mentioned previously, the pumping of the sand-laden mud had been a source of problems for other operators in the Faja. This design improvement eliminated the transfer pumps and the attendant gas locking and wear problems.
