Formulation and Environmental Impact Evaluation of Walnut and Soya Bean Oil Based Drilling Fluid

One of the oil and gas hazard that associated with drilling operation is oil based drilling fluid and its associated cutting disposition. It is highly imperative for policy maker to propagate the use of environmental friendly oil based mud for drilling operation. This paper formulated environmentally friendly oil based mud (using walnut and soya bean plant oil) that can carry out the same function as convectional oil based drilling fluid and equally meeting up with the HSE (Health, safety and environment) standard. Mud laboratory tests were carried out at standard condition on plant oil samples so as to ascertain the rheological properties of the drilling fluid formulations. The synthetic oil based was obtained from drilling company in Nigeria and was used as control experiment.

At the end of the experiment, the properties of the walnut and soya beans based mud was compared with industry oil based mud (synthetic oil based mud). All the results were shown to be similar to that of commercial synthetic oil based drilling mud which was gotten from the industry. From the results it can be seen that walnut and soya beans based mud actually gives a less toxic, better rheological properties, requires less waste disposal costs, hence making them more economically and technically viable for oil and gas drilling operation.