Formulating Drilling Mud for Troubled Zone Formation Using Locally Sourced Materials

Abstract

This paper is to formulate locally drilling mud that will be used to drill trouble zones formations successfully. Trouble zones are zones with abnormal characteristics encountered during drilling operations, such as zones of high circulation lost and zones with high formation pressure. In this paper, the zone of abnormal lost circulation was considered. For drilling to be successful drilling mud was formulated and beneficiated to lessen its filtrate into the formation and also raise its density. The outcome of this research work shows that mud formulated and beneficiated with local clay and bentonite had a decrease of filtrate volume (in percentage (%)) into the formation from 22.3 to 7.8 and 5.6 to 5 respectively. The outcome of mud density after beneficiated with 70g of barite and subjecting it to temperatures up to 80°C was still very high (12.6ppg for local clay and 13.4ppg for bentonite). Since local material used here had close results in cumulative filtrate loss and mud density, they can make use instead of foreign materials so as to save more resources that are spent on importation.