Hello Community, I'm Ndianabasi Tom, currently a final year student studying Petroleum Engineering. As a way of making my research work (project) more relevant and useful, I will be sharing my project proposal here for contributions, scrutiny, suggestions and criticism in view of embarking on the research. This is a multi-part article, on that note, other parts and chapters will be posted subsequently. I look forward to seeing your comments. Thank you in anticipation.
INTRODUCTION
Background Of Study
In terms of foreign exchange, the oil and gas industry has brought about enormous contributions and advancement to the economy of Nigeria. This is so because the oil company tends to generate lots of income when an operation is being carried out successfully and hence, generates revenue to the country. In the Niger Delte region, oil and gas exploration dates back to the mid 1950s, when the first oil reserve was being discovered at Oloibiri in the present day Bayelsa State in 1956.
Recently, the Nigerian government's earnings from crude oil sales has been curtailed and limited as a result of the global collapse in the price of crude oil. This scenario has also placed some sort of financial constraints on the major players in the oil industry and it happens that the indigenous oil companies are the most affected. There are the most hit of these players in that they may not have that much capacity financially and resource wise when compared to their international counterparts.
Owing to this, there is a great need to look inwards into the harnessing of the available local resources as a way of providing solutions to the present challenges in the oil and gas industry. Harnessing and utilizing local resources would then bring about a clear reduction in the rate of importation of materials as well as the conservation of financial resources for the indigenous oil companies.
Hydrocarbons (crude oil) are being located thousands of feet beneath the ground and thus, can only be accessed and exploited through effective and correct drilling operations. In view of this fact, the petroleum industry has continued to make increasing use of clay, which is the major constituent of drilling fluids. This implies that in order to access and recover oil and gas reserves, drilling of oil wells into the rocks is a necessary factor and as well, clay and drilling mud will always be a much needed and relevant tools in the oil and gas industry.
Drilling operations happen to be a major and very important aspect in the oil and gas industry and a very essential ingredient for this operation is the drilling mud which is often referred to as drilling fluid. The drilling operation, which involves the penetration of the earth’s crust to several thousands of feet where the hydrocarbons are accumulated in the reservoir using rotary drilling process, cannot be successfully carried out without the use of drilling mud. Since drilling operation becomes very necessary for the confirmation and extraction of oil and gas from beneath the earth surface, the availability of drilling fluid is of high concern to the petroleum industry. This then makes clay deposits (bentonite) a much needed and necessary tool as it is majorly need for the formulation of drilling fluids.
The use of the term “drilling fluid” is often preferred to the generic term “drilling mud” because it implies that the characteristics, features or attributes are essentially designed into fluid system rather than those that occur naturally in subsurface formations through the mixing of water and formation clays. In addition, the term “drilling fluids” relates fluids with differing composition while “drilling muds” simply mean a mixture of clay and water. Drilling mud constitutes a large proportion of oil field chemicals consumed annually (Agwu et al., 2015).
The raw materials used for the formulation of drilling mud are usually selected clays and are mainly judged by their behaviour in water. Their suitability is determined by various criterias, which includes filtration characteristics, volumetric yield of a given clay, abrasives content and soluble impurites . The raw material which meets most of these requirements happen to be bentonite. Bentonite is a clay mineral that is composed principally of three-layer clays, such as montmorillonite, and widely used as a mud additive for viscosity and filtration control.
Bentonite was named after Fort Benton (Wyoming, USA), the locality where it was first found. In addition to montmorillonite, bentonite may also contain feldspar, biotite, kaolinite, illite, cristobalite, pyroxene, zircon, and crystalline quartz (Parkes, 1982).
It is a well-known fact that drilling activities in the petroleum industries in Nigeria have consumed, are still consuming and will still be consuming large amounts of clays for the sole purpose of formulating drilling fluids. Sadly, these large amount of clays are all being imported, not minding the fact that Nigeria has a very large reserve of clay.
The proven reserve of bentonite in Nigeria has been modestly estimated to be above 700 million metric tons (Aigbedion and Iyayi, 2007; James et al., 2008; Omole et al., 2013; Bilal et al., 2015) with the bulk of it lying in Afuze, Edo State, Mid-Western Nigeria which holds about 70–80 million metric tons of bentonite clay (Nweke et al., 2015; Nweke, 2015).
As a result of this vast deposits of local bentonite currently present in the Nigerian soil, the Federal Government of Nigeria in 2003 placed a restriction on the importation of foreign bentonite clays as a way of tapping into the vast deposits of clay in the country (Oriji et al., 2014). Despite this act done by the federal government, the oil and gas industry is yet to place full confidence in the use of locally sourced bentonite clays for drilling application, as there is little or no reported case of the use of local bentonite clays for drilling operations.
Yearly bentonite's importation by companies in Nigeria amounts to millions of dollars and this is not helping in the growth and development of economy of the nation. The more reason the federal government came up with the initiative of developing local content, that is, harnessing and utilizing local resources.
Drilling fluids highly affects the total cost associated with a particular drilling operation. Hence, the formulation of drilling fluid using local clays becomes very much needed, considering the fact that more drilling fluid will be required as oil and gas exploitation has expanded to other regions aside from the conventional onshore areas.
Drilling fluids have been used has the circulating agent to ensure primarily, the removal of cuttings from the wellbore to the surface, hole stabilization, pressure maintenance and control etc since the advent of rotary drilling. Now as development reached rotary drilling, more engineering attention was drawn to drilling fluids and its function broadened as well, which has demanded its compositional increase.
Odumugbo (2005) maintains that drilling companies operating on the shores of the Niger Delta import bulk drilling fluid materials to carry out their respective operations. This has been a great burden and major concern to the industry since some of these drilling fluid materials cannot be recycled (Oyeneyin, 1998). The foreign exchange involved and the high cost of drilling fluid materials also constitute a problem for the petroleum industry. Owing to this, there is a need for formulating drilling fluids using local materials and therefore, imperative to locally outsource clay materials in order to conserve foreign exchange, create employment and to enhance Nigerian Local Content development in the drilling component of oil and gas industry.
REFERENCES
- ENHANCING THE PERFORMANCE OF UBAKALA CLAY FOR USE AS DRILLING MUD.
- Formulation of water-based drilling fluid using local materials
- Properties and application of Nigerian bentonite clay deposits for drilling mud formulation: Recent advances and future prospects
- Suitability of Using Agbarha Clay for Drilling Mud Formulation in Oil and Gas Industry
- EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LOCAL CLAY FROM EBONYI STATE, NIGERIA AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR BENTONITE IN DRILLING FLUIDS
- http://www.ijesmjournal.com/issues%20PDF%20file/Archive-2015/JUlY-SEPTEMBER-2015/3.pdf
- http://eprints.covenantuniversity.edu.ng/12564/1/1-s2.0-S0169131717301102-main.pdf