Chemical modification of barite for improving the performance of weighting materials for water-based drilling fluids

With increasing drilling depth and large dosage of weighting materials, drilling fluids with high solid content are characterized by poor stability, high viscosity, large water loss, and thick mud cake, easier leading to reservoir damage and wellbore instability. In this paper, micronized barite (MB) was modified (mMB) by grafting with hydrophilic polymer onto the surface through the free radical polymerization to displace conventional API barite partly. The suspension stability of water-based drilling fluids (WBDFs) weighted with API barite:mMB = 2:1 in 600 g was significantly enhanced compared with that with API barite/WBDFs, exhibiting the static sag factor within 0.54 and the whole stability index of 2. The viscosity and yield point reached the minimum, with a reduction of more than 40% compared with API barite only at the same density. Through multi-stage filling and dense accumulation of weighting materials and clays, filtration loss was decreased, mud cake quality was improved, and simultaneously it had great reservoir protection performance, and the permeability recovery rate reached 87%. In addition, it also effectively improved the lubricity of WBDFs. The sticking coefficient of mud cake was reduced by 53.4%, and the friction coefficient was 0.2603. Therefore, mMB can serve as a versatile additive to control the density, rheology, filtration, and stability of WBDFs weighted with API barite, thus regulating comprehensive performance and achieving reservoir protection capacity. This work opened up a new path for the productive drilling of extremely deep and intricate wells by providing an efficient method for managing the performance of high-density WBDFs.