Drilling fluids touch just about everything in the
drilling process.
We're here to d the drilling process and
drilling fluid concepts
to provide a deeper understanding of our industry.
In each episode, we'll share information. Talk to
interesting people and maybe share a few stories
along the way. Welcome to the flow line.
A production of Aes drilling fluids, brought to
you by Matt Off and Justin Got.
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of
the flow line, Matt. How are you doing
today? I'm good.
I took a nap yesterday. I I'm taken
a nap in a long time.
What led up to the nap? I feel
like there's a story behind them. Oh, yeah.
Okay. I had a friend over and
time. Yeah. Well, we just sat balcony he
had a couple of drinks. And then I
went to bed a little later than usual
on Saturday night. And so I said, you
know what I'm just gonna sleep in. Normally
on Sunday mornings, I get up around 5,
05:30.
Go for a run, and then go to
church.
And
this go around us decide to sleep right
in.
Went ahead and enjoyed the extra hour or
whatever before the kids woke me up, And
I was like, I still need to get
a workout in, but I don't think I'm
gonna do it in the middle of the
day. So Was like, maybe get it really,
really Monday or, like, I was trying to
plot how I was gonna get 2 runs
in this week. Got it. But
vacation bible school is this week. So my
wife was volunteering to help set up.
The children had long term childcare care.
Well she was setting up. So we drove
separate. I get home from church by myself
at, like, 11. Let's bang this sucker out.
Right? So I go, and it is very
hot, and I am not young anymore. I
actually had a great run, didn't stop or
anything, which I was like, I see what
my body tells. Be kinda doing this. It's
had a great run, get home. You do
it, like, it's Houston, like, take a shower
and you're still sweating when you get out
and all that and me By about 01:30,
I could barely stay awake.
When the little 1 went down, I went
down,
selling great. And then my son, my older
1, he needed some attention. And I was
like, how about this?
You can pick a Disney movie.
But it has to be a movie, so
I don't have to keep clicking Mh, like,
another episode. Yeah. So he watched a good
chunk of Monsters ink to wrap round up
my nap, classic. Yeah. I've definitely fallen asleep
Monsters inc on several occasions. And I'm weird
at home. I don't actually sit on the
couch. I'm a floor person. Like, I'll never...
Let's say never. If I'm at like someone's
house, then I sit on couch, but if
I'm at home, I'm on floor. Mh. And
which normally means I'm falling asleep. So to
movies and such, but when No. That's pretty
good. I have not taken a nap in
a long time. I could definitely use 1
though. I think I've mentioned that we've been
in full blown cell phone mode. So, again,
all all weekend this weekend too. Yeah. Another
long weekend on the also. Both feel we
got second place again. Wow. Yeah. So we're
doing well. We just for some reason we
get to the championship game. We just can't
put it all together.
Little errors overthrow.
It's in the details when you're that good,
though. Right? It is... It's while going from
rec league to a bunch of 7 and
8 year old and 9 year old girls
going to, like, an All star. And it's
actually watching good gameplay. You can make double
plays. Girls are catching fly balls,
So, yeah, It's not just, like mercy rule
every inning and whoever gets, like, 1 out
finally gets to win the game. It's a
lot of times 3 up 3 down. So
it's pretty good. Softball for that age. But,
anyway, I sell that to say is just
you're on the sun and the heat and
all that. And, yeah. I'm kinda feeling it.
We're supposed to take a break this last
week because it was 3 weekends in a
row then break than 3 weekends a row.
But now we're going all the way through,
so it's gonna be 7 weekends straight,
which is exhausting. Yeah. So anyway, I'm not
complaining. It's a great time, but I'm pretty
wore out at this point. You should bring
a caught with you to these events. I
know. I, contemplated just getting in the truck
and sleeping. But anyway, with all that being
said, we were talking about something before the
show, which we might say it for the
next 1 in the interest at time, if
anyone out there listening and you're a big
Ai apple person, you may be excited to
know that Siri can do more than
mispronounce names and get to the wrong song
if you ask her to play it. So
series about to get a huge upgrade by
Open Ai which I'm excited about. Maybe we
can talk about the whole Ai. Maybe we
should do an Ai episode. I don't know.
What you could. Series We could the only
really important fun fact about Siri that everybody
needs to know is that
the foundation for
series
training.
Was the En emails that were disclosed in
all of the
investigation because it was 1 of the largest
datasets sets you know, of, like, natural language
made public,
the, like, 600000 emails or whatever. No what.
So Yeah. What? Mh. The more you know
with Matt Off Ba guy. Well, half as
interesting on Youtube. Check it out. But a
lot of Ai was based off of those
because it was such a large yeah. Tran
of data. Kidding. Yeah. Fascinating.
Well, moving on to drilling fluids. That's why
we're here folks and hopefully you are too.
Water based mud series. We've gone through a
lot. Believe it or not there's 1, maybe
2 more, but at least 1 more, We've
got corrosion inhibitors. Something imperative in water based
mud. If you've ever ran water based mud,
you probably are aware that you're either
yourself as your company or maybe you have
a third party, but they're important to manage
corrosion on all your surface equipment and drill
pipe and all the rest of it, Let's
talk about Corrosion inhibitors. What do you think?
I think it's more than necessary if we're
gonna get through a water based month series.
Yeah. That's exactly right. Let's just talk about
limiting corrosion
via the mechanism.
Yeah. So the important thing is to think
about, I guess I'll qualify
we're gonna focus on products here. So we
have done episodes on
mechanisms.
We did an episode on why chloride take
Chrome. There are some other episodes worth looking
at if you want some more background on
this. But all of these products are designed
to limit. The way the mechanism of corrosion
works. So
think of you may remember from science class,
where they show you sort of like a
battery. So you have, like, a conductive path,
but what's happening in is you have
assume we're doing carbon steel, but
iron dissolves in water. Okay? Some electrons are
released and they flow through the cathode
A little bit of hydrogen gas is released,
and then oxygen water and free electrons,
release these hydroxyl groups that react with free
iron,
and give you iron oxide. Rust. Right? So
you have this path. And if there's any
way, I can sort of
disrupt those
things for any part of that equation. I
don't have the circuit anymore. Right? Unfortunately, we
can't eliminate it altogether, but we sure can't
slow it down. A lot of this is
subject to your well conditions, metallurgy, all that
other stuff. I figured we'd just sort of
run through
the products
keeping in mind that there's other practices and
other things you can use to mitigate
corrosion as well. Right. Well, let's start with
that then and then we'll move into the
process. Let's just talk about Ph true. Quick.
Yes. And I think you gotta start there.
Right? This is a big 1. And normally,
a ph of about 9, what we're doing
is we're limiting those hydrogen the 8 plus
it's available? Real and think about it low
ph, lots of hydrogen, that's like acid gas
or acid materials.
Anyways, we wanna keep the ph up if
we can,
and we've talked about some of those sources
of a,
whether it's lime or caustic or soda ash
or what have you, but
when you get above 9, you've got a
lot fewer hydrogen and remember Ph log, so
you're in a pretty happy place to mitigate
corrosion. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So now that we've
got the foundation sort of the understanding there,
let's get into the products. Let's go with
the first 1 being bio side. I put
this in the order. I learned corrosion inhibition
Bo.
We start with
side oxygen scavenger,
corrosion inhibitor,
and then
scaling whatever it is, Bo.
I like wait b... Yeah. Yeah. Oh, forgot
about the inhibitors. But in effect, bio sides,
the problem with bacteria is they can release
acid gases. H2SC2,
what do you wanna do? You wanna kill
those bugs?
So you can use glut.
You can use tri.
Tri
is actually also an Hu s scavenger. So
a lot of times you're adding it anyways.
It's just... You're not supposed to... There's registration
and all kinds of stuff with bio side.
So you gotta be careful.
What is it primary function blah blah. So
glut is a very common 1.
And we'll it kills bugs. So we're limiting
some acid gases that could create those hydrogen
that would accelerate corrosion. Got it. Number 2,
oxygen scavenger.
So we mentioned that oxygen water free oxygen
react with free iron to produce rust,
well, if we scavenge the oxygen, we limit
that process.
Oxygen scavenger
react with oxygen in the fluid, They will
also react with atmospheric oxygen. What that means
is it is best to put this as
close to the suction as you can. And
even if you can pump and inject it
below the mud line in the pits, even
better. You should. And the most common the
1 that most folks use is ammo by
su. The thing with ammo by sulfide is
you gotta keep your hardness down
because it'll form pre prohibit,
calcium sulfate if you have a high hardness,
so you just neutralize it, it pre.
The other 1 that I wanna mention is,
if you're in a lab and you makes
glut
and ammo by sulfide,
it's gonna create a pre, and we're gonna
just say, oh my gosh. What's going on.
Here's a story. Glut,
you add that first. You kill the bugs.
There's no more bugs. Where glut or also
kinda get spent doing that.
Now you're 1 by sulfide can work just
fine without any...
Adverse reaction with the buy side.
Okay? A lot of times too for treating
H2, which west Texas were doing it all
the time we're wearing tri anyways, and it's
fine with that oxygen scavenger. And ammo by
su, you're monitoring your oxygen, you can use
to dissolved oxygen meter. There's
titration. But the other thing you can do
is you can measure excess sulfide.
With the idea that owning by su turns
into sulfate when it interacts with oxygen. So
if you have sulfide coming in at the
flow line, it means it's reacted with all
of the in trained air in the fluid
most likely. Then if you do are using
a calcium system or very high hardness,
you can use e salt, which doesn't have
as great of an operating window, but certainly
performs and is useful if you need it.
It just takes a bit more to make
the same thing happen. But it'll scavenge oxygen.
So those are kind your most common off
the shelf
oxygen scavenger. Got it. So what about some
other cro of gases that you might, see
that you need to take care of. And
these are ones, like oxygen scavenger you're always
gonna have oxygen. Right? Yeah. But there are
other c gas that when you encounter them,
you wanna be prepared. So there are some
products for that, like, C02,
you can use mono amin,
which is pretty darn expensive.
Keep in mind, we've talked about other ways,
you can treat C02.
I'll call that more a treatment than a
scavenger.
Would be to, kinda drive the C into
calcium carbonate
through lime and whatnot, there's other ways to
treat. But if you're going straight after it,
that is a... Scavenger for C. So C
s situation, Everybody's is like, oh, in plants,
we use this stuff, well, it's super expensive.
So be really difficult to do in large
gale. Yeah. And then 2 s scavenger. We
already kinda mentioned it. So tri is a
very common 1. The great thing about it
is it's liquid
sol,
blends with everything, and it also acts as
a bio side. So that's probably your most
common, but keep in mind we have the
zinc oxide, this zinc carbonate, which is
for your Nas year situations at first to
pre precipitation that out. So, yeah, I think
we got the gases. Yeah. Taken care of
that. So then number 3 on the list
of products, scale inhibitors.
Scale inhibitors,
the thing is when you got all this
hard water and you have it with gas,
sometimes
these things want who pre precipitation into things
that form scale, especially like lime scale or
something across pipe. Mh. What that does is
it actually creates
a concentration cell
where you may actually have areas where you
get real aggressive pitting
because, you know, that anode cathode thing,
you actually have 1 area where things aren't
transferring as quickly as another. It's like the
cathode becomes much more accelerated and over a
much less surface area.
You'll see pitting on the pipe, which could
be catastrophic from a failure perspective. The key
is, let's not let scale form. Let's keep
our... Surface is nice and smooth and consistent.
A lot of them, pho chemistry is probably
the most common. What we do is we
look for ions that are likely to pre
participate. Our okay calcium.
So if you can, keep your calcium down.
If you can't, or even if you're just
being careful, what you can do is you
can add 1 of these and it will
limit the ability
to form that sort of crystal structure. There's
different ways at 1. It can just tie
up the calcium through, like, a ke lint
type of material and or it can prohibit
the sort of structure from forming, where it
keeps these things all from separate from wanting
to stick to each other So as a
scale inhibitor is just that, it's trying to
limit the deposition of these materials and mass.
Got it. Got it. Okay. Last but not
least
a film or like a filming agent. Yeah.
So a lot of the stuff you'll use
in static environments.
The challenge we have in a dynamic drilling
environment is
if you don't get an even coding with
some of this stuff, you can have that
same scaling
concentration cell effect. But the idea is that
you coat the pipe, that you no longer
have a conductive path. So you could oil
wet it, and that would actually limit corrosion.
Arguably a lubricant that oil wet everything
could actually help with mitigated corrosion. But you're
undermining that conductive path.
The issue is that you have to keep
it up. A lot of times we'll either
use these and we're pulling out out pipe,
we'd wipe it or soak it.
And that when we're going to lay it
down. The last time I really was involved
in doing this was geothermal wells where it
was really, really hot. So courage was a
huge huge problem.
They're always trying to find ways to protect
the pipe. But you won't see this as
much in your circulating system. Right. They exist.
That's why we included them, but why we
included them last.
Makes sense. Again, there's not an exhaustive list,
but obviously, there's ones there that really do
the trick. It's not a very complex system.
Now. We didn't talk about treatment levels and
how to test and this and that and
the other, but I think it's important to
note sort of the mechanism.
And the products that we're working with, matt.
I mean, is there anything else that you
can help tie this all together with? The
only thing I would say is these are
kinda your run of the mill mild environment
additives.
Where the real challenge becomes is that extreme
temperatures or really harsh conditions
require some really special chemist and special additives
And that requires some pretty
in... Testing and that sort of thing
that can get pretty challenging and special corrosion,
it's annoying because
There's a lot of different types of equipment
depending on whether environment static or dynamic,
and a lot of the tests take 28
days or what have you? Yeah. So it's
real fun to so coupons for 28 days
and find out it all failed and get
to wait another month. Meanwhile you've been drilling
with it. Same stuff.
Hopefully. Usually, this isn't in the planning phase,
usually.
Yeah. Funny story that didn't really happen to
us. But anyway, in other news,
Again, appreciate you running through this Matt. Again,
you could get super in the weeds with
this type of stuff from the chemistry side
of things, but nonetheless, important to note, water
based mud series.
Hopefully, everyone's been enjoying it. I do wanna
make a mention though, we do have a
tech tip and are continuing to put up
more tech tip. So if you've been following
the Youtube channel for a while. You'd notice
that we had taken a little bit of
a break from the tech tip situation, but
we've got them back now just a great
visual for those who like to learn via
videos.
Great commentary and just a good deep dive
on... I think we did density was the
last 1 and what we continue to put
out more. Matt, can you give us any
line of sight on that kind of stuff?
Because you're kinda being in charge of that
so situation. Yeah. Well, the thing is we
got better at video and that sort of
thing. So we had some stuff in the
pipeline, and then it was like, wow, we
can actually do a much better job some
of the talent that we brought on board.
Mh. And kind of getting our ducks in
a row. The 1 we just really sun
mud weight, yeah, We talk about using a
pressurized versus atmospheric mud balance, but we try
and get into the cor meters and some
of the automated concepts as well
once again, we try to make it short
sweet and informative.
And then I think we've got 1 of
the pipeline on just general knowledge on Bay
wright. And which seems to always come up
in 1 form fashion.
And then further round on the line, we've
got a couple of other ideas.
However, if somebody got a great idea for
a tech tip. Sling it our way. Really
loved to educate. You'll definitely get the gold
star for me. We'll be willing to give
it to you. If you can give us
a good idea for a tech tip, Mad
and the team are always looking for good
ideas. We've got a bunch, but again, coming
from the listeners and I'll say this again,
a lot of the best episodes we've had
have come from listeners questions. And so if
you're listening out there who wants, Matt and
the team to put together a tech tip,
Hollywood production style. You know it's gonna come
and it's gonna be good. So ask, Matt
and the team, you can reach us at
the flow line podcast at a, fluids dot
com, or you can reach out to us
on Linkedin. The Aes fluids page is also
great if you follow us on Linkedin. Kinda
keep up with what we're doing, a lot
of informative content.
But also just a good way to kinda
share what we're experiencing and then some of
the things we're doing within the company, you
know, different events, talking about different mud schools
and just everything that we're doing, so please
follow and connect with us there. And with
that being said everyone, appreciate you tuning in,
Share the episode and until next time. Take
care. Thanks for listening. Please tune in next
week for another exciting episode of the flow
line. And remember, may your return? Always be
full and your trips always smooth.
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