HIGH PERFORMANCE ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY DRILLING FLUIDS

摘要

The invention discloses an environmentally friendly drilling fluid, or mud, composition useful in the production of oil and gas. The drilling fluid is constituted of one or more of weighting agents, emulsifiers, wetting agents, viscosifiers, fluid loss control agents, proppants, and other particulates such as used in a gravel pack, emulsified with a paraffinic solvent composition which forms a continuous oil phase, or water-in-oil invert phase. The solvent composition is constituted of a mixture of C10-C24 n-paraffins and isoparaffins having an isoparaffin:n-paraffin molar ratio ranging from about 0.5:1 to about 9:1, and the isoparaffins of the mixture contains greater than 50 percent of mono-methyl species, based on the total weight of the isoparaffins in the mixture.