Drilling fluid is critical for the safely operation of drilling activities, the protection of reservoir and the success of oil and gas investment.

Because the importance of drilling fluid, a good amount of research and development work have been conducted to enhance the performance of drilling fluid. Many kinds of additives are added to drilling fluid to turn the property of drilling fluid to meet the needs of certain drilling jobs. Oil based drilling mud is one of the major kind of drilling fluid widely used in the oil and gas industry. Due to the cost of the oil based mud, and the potential thread if oil based mud is dumped, many countries put forward regulations for the recovery of the fluid in oil based mud. It is necessary to recover the fluid in the oil-based drilling fluid to save drilling cost, and to protect environment.

In oil and gas drilling process major portion of the fluid from oil based mud (OBM) is recycled into the drilling fluid system through shale shakers, decanter centrifuges. Yet there is still a big percentage of fluid from OBM being attached to the surface of drilling cuts. Typically, the OOC (oil on cutting) can be up to 15-20%. In other words, about 1/5 of the expensive drilling fluid in OBM is wasted.

In order to solve this challenge, GN Solids Control conducted extensive research and development work and successfully released vertical drilling cut dryer to the market.

A typical application of drilling cut dryer is to position the system in a center location, where transportation vehicles send drilling cut to the location and unload the drilling cut into a collect bin. A conveyor will transport the drilling cut to a hopper, which is mounted on top of the cutting dryer. The cutting comes into the cutting dryer, and the centrifugal force generated by the rotation of rotating basket can be a few hundreds time of G force and thus force the fluid, along with smaller particles, to go through the screen basket and is collected through channel system and flow to a collector, while the solids accumulated on the screen basket is pushed down by tungsten carbide enforced cutting knife and discharged at the bottom of cutting dryer.

Collected fluid has certain concentration of solids under 0.25mm, which needs to be removed by next equipment, decanter centrifuge. GN Solids Control manufactures a series of decanter centrifuge up to 30 inch bowl.

After being processed by decanter centrifuge, the solids in the collected fluids is minimized and is ready to be used for drilling operation again.

A major advantage of vertical cutting dryer is its ability to generate profit, in addition to environment protection, because the fluid is expensive. The base fluid is diesel, which is already costly. The addition of different chemicals, to improve flow dynamic, to increase holding capability of drilling fluid, to protect reservoir formations, to help to dissipate heat generated by the drilling process, and to improve lubrication capability of drill bit, tremendously increased the cost of oil based drilling fluid.

One of GN vertical drilling cut dryer was used by Great Wall Drill. According to the operation manager of the drilling rig, they can save up to USD 3,000 for each cubic meter of fluid recovered. Usually the processing capability of such equipment can process 10 m³/h of drilling cut, and recover 1m³ of drilling fluid. In another word, a vertical drilling cut dryer can recover 8 m³ of drilling fluid an hour, which can save the drilling rig at least $15,000 per each 8 hour shift.

If we put it the other way, the cost of a GN vertical cutting dryer can be recovered in a few months and for the rest of the time, profit generated would be unbelievable.

Offshore Technology Conference has been the top exhibition for oil and gas technologies. It has been held for 50 years. With the 50^th anniversary of OTC, petroleum industry welcomes an important event.

With its continued effort, GN Solids Control put forwarded new and updated products including. At the exhibition, GN Solids presented the following products:

• shale shakers
• decanter centrifuges
• vacuum pumps
• centrifugal pumps

GN Solids Control also bring a series of effectively profitable products to the exhibition, including:

• oil sludge treatment systems
• automatic tank cleaning systems
• vertical cutting dryers
• shale shaker screens, for GN shale shakers and as replacement screens for shale shakers of other brands.

Years of painstaking effort in research and development has been improving the quality, performance, variety and profitability of equipment & systems by GN Solids Control. Some of the products by GN Solids Control with good profitability are:

• Oil sludge treatment system

Long time oil field development activities left many seriously polluted areas in a good number of countries. Nothing can grow on such land and will eventually lead to ecological disaster. This is especially true in the un-developed countries where legislation is weak, so is law enforcement.

However, with ever growth awareness of environment protection, more and more attention is given to the remediation of such pollutions. Oil sludge treatment system from GN Solids Control provides an effective solution to solve this difficult situation.

Such systems take oil sludge, send it to pre-mixer, then convey it to shale shaker by GN. Discharged solids will be delivered to final disposal process. Recovered fluid will be pumped to another mixer for combine with chemicals so that the fluid can be treated with decanter centrifuge. Separated solids will be sent to final disposal process again, which the recovered fluid will be taken over to a 3 phase disc separator, where it will be separated into oil, water and solids.

This process can complete remediate seriously polluted land and can make it arable, for us, and for future generations.

One important thing is that, GN Solids Control can provide all the equipment required by such system and therefore can provide a cost effective and reliable oil sludge system for customers.

• Automatic tank cleaning system

There are countless mud tanks and all kind of other tanks being used worldwide. Cleaning such tank is a major challenge to all the owners of such tanks.

These kind of tanks are used to be cleaned manually, which is pretty tedious and impose a serious risk to the cleaning people because usually the inside of the tanks is refined space and has limited accessibility, there might be toxic gas inside the tanks as well, which can endanger the life of people. In addition, the floor of such tanks is usually pretty slippery, dim, making the cleaning work very dangerous and time consuming.

Automatic tank cleaning system by GN Solids Control effectively solves this problem.

In such system, there is a buffer tank which supply chemical solutions to the cleaning head through a water booster. The cleaning head is inside the tank to be cleaned, and rotates at preset scanning pattern, making the chemical spray to cover all the surface of the tank. Flushed down dirt will be sucked up by a hose connected to a suction pump, which transfer the slurry from the tank to a inclined plate clarifier, where solids is separated from chemical solutions and pumped out through a membrane pump to skip, while the clean chemical solution will overflow to buffer tank, to provide washing material to the cleaning head inside mud tank.

This system is efficient, it can clean one tank in one hour including time to deploy the system. if no relocation is necessary, it can clean on tank in half an hour. It requires at most 2 operators and therefore one man-hour to clean a tank.

If such tank is cleaned by people, it takes 24 to 36 man-hour. In other word, it is 24 to 36 time more efficient than manual cleaning.

Let us do a calculation.

Regular wage for field worker is $50. 36 man-hour is $1,800. With GN automatic tank cleaning system, labor cost is $50, plus electricity, may be another $50.

GN Automatic tank cleaning system provide a very cost effective solution to the labor and cost intensive tank cleaning job.

You can find more information including videos for the field application of the above systems at this link.