Chapter 1 - Importance of Downhole Chemistry

1.01 Instructor Introduction (15 min.) Sample Lesson
1.02 Brine Chemistry (9 min.) Quiz: 1.02 Brine Chemistry
1.03 Biocide (8 min.) Quiz: 1.03 Biocide
1.04 Polymers (7 min.) Quiz: 1.04 Polymers
1.05 Friction Reducers (12 min.) Quiz: 1.05 Friction Reducers
1.06 Impacts on Molecular Weight (14 min.) Quiz: 1.06 Impacts on Molecular Weight
1.07 R+ Concept & Formation Lithology (10 min.) Quiz: 1.07 R+ Concept & Formation Lithology
1.08 Clay Swelling (9 min.)
1.09 Migratory Clay (12 min.) Quiz: 1.09 Migratory Clay
1.10 Manufacturing Friction Reducers (18 min.) Quiz: 1.10 Manufacturing Friction Reducers
1.11 Invert Emulsion (ePAM) (10 min.) Quiz: 1.11 Invert Emulsion (ePAM)
1.12 Global Acrylamide Market (6 min.) Quiz: 1.12 Global Acrylamide Market

Chapter 2 - Polymers in Solution - Rheology

2.01 Introduction to Rheology (17 min.) Quiz: 2.01 Introduction to Rheology
2.02 Types of Fluids (10 min.)
2.03 Hooke's Law (24 min.)
2.04 Completions Viscoelasticity (2 min.) Quiz: 2.04 Completions Viscoelasticity

Chapter 3 - Laboratory Evaluation of Completions Chemical Program

3.01 Lab Evaluations - Completions (15 min.)
3.02 Lab Evaluations - Field Trial (2 min.)
3.03 Impact of Chemistry Selection (8 min.) Quiz: 3.03 Impact of Chemistry Selection
3.04 Anadarko Basin (13 min.)
3.05 - Eagle Ford (8 min.)

Oilfield Chemistry Structured to the Non-Chemist / Chapter 1 - Importance of Downhole Chemistry

Lesson 1.01 Instructor Introduction

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Instructor Introduction

Welcome to Oilfield Chemistry from a physical chemist perspective. So my name is Kimberley Mac Ewen. I'm a PhD physical chemist, as already stated. I am born and raised in Canada. I have a general chemistry degree from the University College of Cape Breton. I then moved to Antigonish, Nova Scotia and I got an honors chemistry degree in physical chemistry. I moved again (and you're going to see a gypsy motif to this), I moved again to Hamilton, Ontario to attend McMaster University where I got my master's in polymer surfactant interactions. Then I moved again to London, Ontario, Canada and I got a PhD from the University of Western Ontario in multi-component diffusion in mixed surfactant systems (try to say that 10 times fast). I then decided I was going to go into academia, so I took a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maine that turned into a faculty position. And I was managing the Ober laboratory and doing research in hemi cellulotic fibers and using them for the generation of biofuels.
I got a call from a production manufacturing facility in Liberty, Texas. And I'll tell you at the time, the difference in salary from academia to industry was twice. So it was like it was a no-brainer. And obviously, since I'm giving you a lecture series in Oilfield Chemistry, you know the path I took. So I immediately packed up and I moved to Texas. And I took a position with, it was a production chemicals manufacturing facility. And they had several reactors but they were all empty. And this company was probably very typical of what's in the oil patch today, is that you'll buy something from a manufacturer, you slap your label on it and you put your nickel on top of it and you sell it to the next person. But what they wanted to do was they wanted to get away from this relabeling or pass-through, and they wanted to actually put chemistry in their own vessels. So my job at the time was to fill these vessels with chemistry.
I didn't know shit from shinola about oil field chemistry. I don't know if any of you out there remember The Beverly Hillbillies. I truly believed, like Jed Clampett, that you just shoot a rifle at the ground and you have this black gold bubbling up. What an idiot. I was so wrong. And it was hard to find anywhere in the oil patch where you could be educated on the chemistry. Most of this is kept very, very secret and I call it the black box of trade names.
So I began educating myself. There was nobody else within the company, as I stated this company was a pass-through. They didn't know how to synthesize the chemistries that they were selling and most times they didn't even know what the chemistry was. So I began to educate myself on all aspects of oil and gas because I didn't know what to learn, because I didn't know what I didn't know. So I started to teach myself all areas from exploration through drilling, completions, production, and all of the chemistries that were used in between. And what you're going to find through this lecture series is that even though they may call something by one name, so the trade name may be product ABC, and it's for an example of bentonite extender that used in the drilling section. Well, that exact same bentonite extender, the chemistry of that, is no different than a scale inhibitor. But the prices are very different. So I hope at the end of this course, what you can get out of this, is that let's remove the trade name and actually just look at the chemistry that's going into our assets. So anyway I diverge from that.
So one of the lovely things I had working with this production facility was that I was able to go from my fume hood to the pilot plant, and then out to full-scale production every day of my life. And I'll tell you something that you learn very quickly is that when you're in a research and development environment, you have weeks, months, years to fix a problem. When you've got chemistry that's in a vessel and something goes wrong, you have to think like that and you have to be able to fix it. So one of the things that you develop very, very quickly is the ability to think on the fly. That's a skillset I thank that company for seven ways to sundown. For me, education is a major, major part of my life and that's probably coming from the academia teaching. When I get bored and my education plateaus, I decide it's time to move on to something else. So before I left that manufacturing facility I believe I had mastered production chemistry. I knew all of the molecules and I developed this structure-function relationship to the point that if you give me a function, I can build a structure to solve that problem. But I didn't know any other area other than production chemistry.
So I decided I was going to leave Texas and I was going to take a position in Charleston, South Carolina. So I became the director of stimulation and enhanced oil recovery. And I loved it because it allowed me to open up my knowledge base, not only now from the chemistry and production, but now I could move into enhanced oil recovery and completions. Plateaued again and decided it was time to move on.
So I took a position in Savannah, Georgia with a major global manufacturer for synthetic polymers, SNF. And I was their global director for their entire energy sector for North and South America. And I learned polymers like nobody's business and I thank them for that. I decided it was time to expand my horizons again. So I took a vice presidency at an oilfield services company. And all of these giving me different perspectives from the chemistry side and expanding my knowledge base.
Almost 3 years ago now, I decided that it was time for me to go fly on my own. The bird was going to leave the nest. I was back in Texas. So if you see the moving, it was from Nova Scotia, Central Canada, Bangor Maine, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, back to Texas. And I opened up my business in Casper, Wyoming which is where I am now in the Powder River Basin. So that's my elevator story.
So the course that we're going to present today is an overview and I'm going to try to keep it as simplistic as possible, because I do realize a lot of people that are going to be watching this content are absolutely not PhD chemists. And I think one of the things I've learned over my entire career is that somebody needs to be able to take something and take it to the level of the audience that they're presenting it to. Very rarely do PhD chemists sit in a room with another bunch of PhD chemists and they all know the same content. That's not true. So what I've tried to do is I'm trying to take this so that it's at a level that is understandable by a majority of the audience that's going to be viewing this content. And I try to represent as much as I can in cartoons, because for me, I understand everything on a cartoon level.
So some of the content we'll be reviewing today is chemistry that's going to be used in the oil field. Specifically, I'm going to delve into the completion side and focus mostly on friction reducers, because I think that a big part of what's not really understood in the completions world is the friction reducer. I really believe that a lot of either chemical sales or operators or engineers think that one friction reducer is the same as all of them. Well I think by the end of this section of this content you'll realize that that's not true.
So I want to talk first about formation damage. Is there an impact on what we choose for our brine chemistry or make down waters? Does the rock have any impact? Then go into some definitions of things like, well what is brine chemistry? What is a friction reducer? What is a biocide? What is a clay inhibitor or stabilizer? What is a breaker? What is a scale inhibitor, etc..?
I want to give you a nice introduction to what exactly is a polymer and what's the difference between a synthetic polymer and an actual polymer? And we'll then focus more in on synthetic polymers, and specifically, what is the chemistry of a synthetic friction reducer? How many of them are available out there? Because I think if you look at trade names, there are thousands and thousands of trade names for friction reducers. And I think you're going to be shocked to find out, within the price range that completions will pay, there's 3, maybe 2. If you like cationic there's 3, but 2 primarily. And I think that's probably going to be eye-opening for a lot of the audience.
I also want to look at what are the impacts if we change the contents on the backbone of the polymer. How do we influence the molecular weight and the functionality of that friction reducer? What is the impact that the rock constituents or the lithology have on the performance of your friction reducer? What about the water chemistry? Does that impact your friction reducer? And then if we're going to manufacture friction reducers, what's the difference between a dry powder and an invert emulsion? We're going to go through all of that. Then I'd like to give you an overview of the global acrylamide market. You may not be aware that there's only a handful of manufacturers, even though there are hundreds and hundreds of chemical providers. And let's look at the market share that each one of these has. So that, what we went through was Chapter 1.
So in Chapter 2, there's buzzwords in the industry. And a lot of chemical providers will come up to an operator and say, 'I'm going to sell you a polymer that's more elastic than another polymer'. What do they mean by that? As we go through Chapter 2, by the time we finish talking about what's the difference between viscosity and rheology? How is that related to acrylamide-based polymers? What about viscoelasticity? What exactly does that mean? I want you to have a deeper understanding of what is oscillatory rheology and how can we get some valuable information from a viscous or elastic modulus? Does it actually mean anything in the field? Does it matter? And then finally, how do polymers interact with charged species like your brine, your lithology? How do the charged species impact the polymer backbone and does that influence the modulus, the viscous or the elastic modulus?
And then finally we'll go through Chapter 3 and we're going to look at, when it comes to evaluating our completions chemistry, are there any kind of lab testings that are more valid than others? Should we be looking at, should we do XRD to look at the lithology? Should we be looking at, does clay content matter? Does pyrite content matter? And then for our frac waters and make down waters, what about a complete water analysis? Does that matter? And then when we look at the frac, the complete completions package, what about iron interactions? What about precipitation? So these would be compatibility studies. What about the hydration? Does it make a difference whether I have a dry powder or I have an invert emulsion in my completions package? Do any of these factors influence it? Then we'll look at like, conductivity of a sand pack or regain permeability. How applicable is that? Does it really matter? Is it reproducible?
And then finally, should we be looking at, are there any kind of emulsions or foaming concerns that may arise on the production side? Because at the end of the day completions eventually will go into the production phase and operators are all one company. We shouldn't be sidled. We have to look and see if we're completing a well are we going to impact in a negative way the production side? Does the chemistry that we choose matter?
And then finally I want to go into some real-life examples. Specifically, I want to hit in the scoop stack or the Cana-Woodford of the Anadarko Basin of the MidCon. And I would like to move into the Permian Basin, specifically the Delaware Basin. And then let's go into South Texas in the Eagle Ford. And let's look at some real-life examples of, if we've chosen bad chemistry and it's had this negative effect on our well, what can happen if we choose the right chemistry based on all of the learnings that you're going to learn through this lecture series.
So thank you for listening to all that. And all that being said, we're now going to move immediately into Chemistry 101 for completions. I hope at the end of all of this that anybody watching this lecture series will be able to make a more educated decision on their choice of, not trade names but chemistries that they choose to put in their assets. Because at the end of the day it's the operator that's left holding the bag.