Biodegradable Materials for Lubricity Enhancement of Drilling Fluids: A Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38032/scse.2025.3.10Keywords:
Drilling mud, Mud additives, Lubricity, Biodegradable materials, Biodegradable lubricantsAbstract
Biodegradable lubricants are essential to meet the demand for sustainable and environment-friendly drilling activities in the oil and gas industry. Lubricants play a major role in decreasing frictional, drag, and torque values that result from the interaction of drill bit, drill string, wellbore, or any other metal surfaces in contact, particularly in directional and extended-reach wells. Oil-based muds (OBMs) pose environmental challenges despite being the ideal lubricating mud. Alternate to this, water-based muds (WBMs) with biodegradable lubricants have promising benefits of lubricity, reduced pour point, increased flash point, and high thermal as well as oxidative stabilities. The potential of biodegradable additives like nano-sized lubricants and lubricants derived and modified from mineral oil and vegetable oil have been explored in this paper. It also highlights recent developments in enhancing drilling fluid using materials such as Henna extract, Wild Jujube Pit Powder (WJPP), and Okra powder. The performance of lubricity of mud is determined through the evaluation of the coefficient of friction directly, whereas the coefficient of adhesion and other mud properties also help to assess lubricity performances. The knowledge of the mechanisms of lubricants – like particle rolling, adsorption mechanism, and layered structure sliding ‒ is essential to find other materials that can possess the same mechanisms and enhance the lubricating property. Therefore, this paper focuses on reviewing the already existing and utilized biodegradable lubricants along with their results and future development ideas. By utilizing biodegradable materials having the properties of enhancing lubricity, the drilling operations can successfully result in less pollution to the environment, and switch to cost-effective and superior lubricating properties without compromising performance.
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