Efeitos da adição da CMC e da calcita nas propriedades de filtração de fluidos argilosos

Abstract

The drilling of oil wells can greatly damage the formation, including the region of interest: the reservoir. Drilling without damaging the reservoir is characterized as a big challenge, and therefore, has been stimulated the development of fluid technologies and optimization of drilling processes, including, for example, the clay fluids use aiming at minimization excessive losses of the filtrate into the permeable formations. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate the influence of additives carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) and calcite (CaCO3) and their interactions in the filtration properties of clay drilling fluids. For this, it was used a sample of bentonite clay, commercially known by Volclay, two samples of CMC with different molecular weight (CMC 1 (9,0 x 104g/mol) and CMC 2 (2,5 x 105g/mol) ) and the same degree of substitution (DS = 0,7) and two samples of calcite (CaCO3) with different average diameters of particles and size distribution curves. It was done the physical and mineralogical characterization of the clay sample and the particle size characterization of the calcite samples it was also determined the rheological properties (apparent viscosity (AV) and plastic (PV), yield limit (YL) and gel strength (GS)) and of filtration (filtrate volume (FV), filtrate volume corrected (FVcorr), spurt loss (SPL), cake thickness (h) and permeability (k) and retaining power (R)) of the studied clay fluids. The results showed that the studied fluids showed pseudoplastic behavior and clay fluids prepared with high concentration of CMC 2 (2g/350mL of water) showed better values of rheological properties, because these properties are strongly influenced by the average degree of polymerization of polymeric additives. The additived clay fluids with low molecular weight carboxymethylcellulose and with fine granulometry calcite gave the fluids best performance in improving the filtration properties. This happened because in the aqueous medium the CMC 1 in high concentration associated at calcite 1 led at lower values of FV, h and k and high values of R.