Application of Silicomanganese Fume as a Novel Bridging Material for Water-Based Drilling Fluids

Steelmaking industrial waste, that is, silicomanganese fume (SMF), is one of the byproducts obtained during the steelmaking process in an electric submerged arc furnace at 1500 °C. Millions of tons of such wastes are generated yearly and used in different applications such as road construction, cement mortar, recycling into sinter plant, and so forth. In this study, the application of SMF in the drilling operations was investigated by employing SMF as a bridging material (BM) in water-based drilling fluid (WBF). The SMF samples were collected and dry-sieved, and then, the retained particles on each mesh were examined for elemental analysis. Thereafter, a battery of tests was performed using the WBF-SMF system comprising different SMF grades and mixed grades to investigate their bridging performance. The commercial BM (marble) was used as a reference fluid (WBF-marble system) for comparative investigation. The bridging performance of WBF-SMF and WBF-marble systems was tested and compared at 190 °F and 300 psi testing conditions using 10, 12, 20, and 50 μm ceramic discs. The processing techniques have shown that raw SMF does not require prolonged processing steps like the other waste material requires. All the SMF grades have shown homogenous chemical composition in oxides of manganese, silicon, sulfur, calcium, magnesium, and iron. Moreover, the WBF-SMF system have shown substantial improvement in bridging and sealing performance with average 47, 42, 84, and 75% superior fluid loss performance against 10, 12, 20, and 50 μm ceramic discs, respectively, compared to the WBF-marble system. While comparing the filter cake thickness, the WBF-SMF system has deposited a filter cake with more than 50% reduction in thickness compared to the WBF-marble system for different ceramic-disc sizes. Consequently, this study has introduced SMF as a novel BM with a unique particle size distribution that can be used in WBFs to plug formation pores effectively. In addition, this waste material (SMF) has been investigated as an economical, effortless, readily available, and high-performance material compared to other commonly used BMs.