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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Baroid Drilling Fluids: Banking on decades of experience for drilling leadership in the present and a stake in the future The first mud company in the world, today Baroid employs 2,150 people worldwide, has 20 grinding plants and 5 mining operation and maintains 150 field stockpoints in 53 countries Alan Bailey PNA Contributing Writer
Drilling an oil well without the correct drilling mud bears some similarity to driving a car without the right oil in the engine – things just don’t work properly. Unlike most car engines, however, an oil well requires an individually tailored set of fluids, geared to the specific well trajectory and rock formations encountered.
That’s where Baroid Drilling Fluids is foremost in the oil field.
A member of the Halliburton Energy Services group of companies, Baroid provides a complete range of drilling fluid services, from drilling mud design to the supply of materials for the fluids. Baroid has operated in Alaska for more than 40 years and employs more than 70 people in the state.
“Baroid was the first mud company in the world,” said Tom Burgin, product service line operations manager for Halliburton Energy Services.
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Baroid employs more than 2,150 people worldwide. It has 20 grinding plants and 5 mining operations that mine, grind, and/or chemically process bentonite and barite, the basic constituents of drilling mud. The company maintains 150 field stockpoints in 53 countries, located near areas of drilling activity, to serve as local warehousing and customer billing centers for its products.
Baroid got its start in the 1920s as a provider of fluids for cleaning well holes and controlling formation pressures. Baroid has had several ownership changes since those early days before merging with Halliburton Energy Services in 1998. Its Alaska operations are based in Anchorage.
“It’s pretty much an integrated, working relationship with all the other (Halliburton) product service lines now,” Burgin said. “The merger gave the two companies a full complement of services.”
Increased drilling complexity Drilling was relatively simple in Baroid’s early years. The straight, shallow well holes of that era placed few demands on drilling muds. Since then, however, the increasing complexity of drilling has forced the creation of fluids with carefully controlled properties. The formulation of drilling fluids has evolved into a specialized engineering skill for Baroid.
Today, Baroid technicians begin their work at the planning stage of a new well.
“The oil company will tell us what kind of well they’re going to be drilling, what formations they’re going to be targeting and the trajectory of the well,” Burgin said. “Based on our experience, we know what these formations need in terms of filtration properties. We also need to take a look at the flow properties of the fluid, which will determine how well the fluid is able to carry cuttings out of the hole.”
Planning is particularly critical in Alaska. The increased use of horizontal and extended reach drilling push drilling technology to its limits. For example, the drill string tends to drop to the low side of a horizontal well bore, causing friction.
“If you can’t keep your torque down, you could twist the pipe in two,” Burgin said. “We have to use a lot of lubricants, which can result in the chemistry becoming quite complex.”
Breaking through barriers The need to tap oil pockets in isolated fault blocks also is a challenge in the Prudhoe Bay field. In particular, mud may leak into geologic faults that delimit a block. High fluid pressures aggravate the mud circulation losses through the faults. Consequently, Baroid has worked with its sister company, Sperry Sun, using sensors to measure the downhole pressures. Monitoring activity inside the well, Baroid technicians can manage the pressures by fine-tuning the composition of the drilling fluids.
Baroid also uses computer models of the wells to counter circulation loss. The models compute fluid compositions that minimize loss while retaining adequate hole cleaning capabilities.
“It’s becoming more and more science and computer driven … to avoid the problems and costs associated with lost circulation,” Burgin said.
Occasionally, designing a workable fluid for a particular well may not be possible. “Sometimes the operator will give us a well that they want to drill and we’ll tell them that it can’t be drilled,” Burgin said. In that case planners must make changes to the well trajectory or some other aspect of the well.
On-site assistance Once drilling starts, Baroid engineers assist the drill teams on-site.
“We have engineers on location who are continually monitoring the properties of the fluid and making adjustments and chemical additions,” Burgin said.
Often, as a drill bit cuts through different types of rock, drillers need to displace various muds at changing stages of the well development.
“We generally use a separate fluid for the surface interval of a well,” Burgin said. “Then they’ll have an intermediate section and that section will take them to the production interval, the pay sands.”
The production interval requires very tight fluid properties, he said.
Also, as the drilling mud circulates back through the well to the surface, Baroid technicians extract rock detritus from the fluid. “You’re continually fighting solids build up in the fluid as you’re drilling,” Burgin said.
Baroid operates a specially equipped solids-control van on the North Slope to separate solids from the mud.
Baroid also operates a filtration van to filter the brines that the company supplies for cleaning well completion and workover fluids.
“They need to put a clean fluid in the well whenever they go to perforation,” Burgin said. “Solids will damage the exposed reservoir.”
To accommodate the continuous demand for drilling fluids on the North Slope, Baroid maintains a manufacturing plant and tank farm in Prudhoe Bay.
“We’re able to build these fluids in advance of needing them on the well,” Burgin said. “When the drillers reach a certain point where they want to put different fluid in the well, they call us up and we’ll ship those fluids to location.”
Supplying materials Baroid supplies all materials required to mix the drilling fluids. The materials come from a wide variety of sources around the world, including Baroid’s own barite and bentonite mines in Wyoming and Nevada. Sodium chloride originates in Alaska.
Carlile Transportation Systems freights the materials to Alaska, trucking the materials to its staging yard in Fairbanks. From there it transports them up the haul road to Prudhoe Bay. The Kenai dock provides a convenient staging point for materials for the Cook Inlet oilfields.
Experience in Alaska With Baroid’s long history in Alaska, the company’s technicians understand the fluid requirements for drilling through many of the rock formations encountered in oilfields around the state.
“We’ve got a high experience level, probably in the neighborhood of 18 to 20 years for our engineers that work for us on the Slope and in the Cook Inlet,” Burgin said. “We’ve worked off and on for just about everybody in the state.”
Baroid currently does most of the fluids engineering for BP’s rotary drilling program and is the drilling fluids company for the Northstar project. Baroid has also accumulated a unique knowledge of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. “We’ve done all of the work in the NPRA for both BP and for ARCO/Phillips,” Burgin said.
And the future is bright.
“We’re part of a very strong organization with Haliburton Energy Services,” Burgin said. “We’re committed to the long run.”
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