Author: gnadmin

Right now, right
there, there are 2 engineers from GN Solids Control working on drilling jobsite
of a North Africa drilling company for first time commissioning and training
for the operators for GN mud plant and waste management systems.

This is an old
client of GN Solids Control and this client have been buying from GN for more
than 2 years. They have purchased from GN for many orders including

1. Complete
solids control systems including shale shaker, mud cleaner, middle speed
decanter centrifuges, high speed decanter centrifuges and other auxiliary
equipments like sand pumps, submersible slurry pumps, mud agitator and mud
guns.

2. complete waste
management systems including the decanter centrifuges, vertical cuttings
dryers, high G shale shakers for drying and screw conveyors for transporting
the materials. This African company has bought from GN Solids Control more than
10 sets of decanter centrifuges including fixed speed ones and vfd controlled
ones.

3. other systems
like mud mixing plant.

For this time of
commissioning, GN engineer is servicing for 1 mud plant with 7 tanks, for each
tank there are 4 sets of mud guns and 4 sets of mud agitators. One of the tanks
is used for mixing, equipped with jet mud mixing hoppers, and a hoist for
lifting the chemicals up over the hoppers on skid of tank.

After the commissioning
of the mud plant, GN engineers would go to 3 drilling rig jobsites for starting
the vertical cuttings dryer GNCD930C respectively. GN Vertical cuttings dryers
have following features comparing with its peers from other suppliers:

1. GNCD930C
vertical cuttings dryer is suitable for both OBM and WBM. Other brands’ are mostly
for OBM only.

2. well
performance proved by many end users on jobsite.

3. both fixed
speed and vfd controlled available for options.

In a complete
drilling rig system, there is a solids control system which is used for
separate out the drilling cuttings from the drilling liquid which comes back
from the drilling wellhead. And with this solids control system, the drilling
cuttings are to the most separated out from the liquid, and after adding some
necessary chemicals into the clean liquid, the drilling mud goes back to the drilling
system. It is considered as a closed loop of drilling.

But you may ask,
how to deal with the drilling cuttings discharged from the shale shaker, mud
cleaner, desander, desilter and the centrifuge? Will the drilling cuttings
damage the soil or land of the environment?

And what to do
with the drilling liquid after it serves for several drilling rigs? Is it
possible that all the drilling cuttings are fully separated out? Is it possible
there are smaller and finer particles in the liquid?

GN has answers
for those questions by using the waste management systems.

According to
their different function, the waste management could be divided as below:

1. the waste management
for further treating the drilling cuttings from the upper hand solids control
system. GN has several standard designed options for these waste management
systems. Normally, a screw conveyor collects and transfer the drilling cuttings
to the vertical cuttings dryer, the liquid discharged by the cuttings dryer
flows into a conserve tank of something alike to be transferred to decanter centrifuge
with a high speed. Both the solids discharged from the cuttings dryer and the
centrifuge are very dry. And liquid could enter to solids control system.

2. after the
drilling cuttings waste management system, the very dry cuttings could enter GN
newly designed solidification unit for final discharge.

3. for the
drilling fluids, GN provide dewatering unit and high speed decanter centrifuge,
after some time operation, the particles become extra fine in the liquid, need
some chemical to merge them to be big enough for centrifuge separation.

A solids control
system for a drilling rig is the recycling system for the drilling liquid. But
during the recycling procedure, in order to ensure the performance of drilling
mud, there are continuously drilling cuttings to be separated out from the
drilling liquid and discharged. How to deal with the drilling cuttings, how to
discharge the waste without harming the environment, they are the question for
the drilling waste cuttings.

At this time, the
drilling cuttings still have some drilling mud on them, if discharged directly,
there are two problems: one is that the drilling mud is containing a lot of
chemicals which may pollute the soil and ground. The soil polluted by drilling
mud could be barren for more than 100 years. The other is that, the drilling
mud is valuable, better recover as much as possible to save the cost.

In order to solve
this problem, the engineers and professionals find below solutions:

1. drilling
cuttings discharged by solids control system is collected by screw conveyor to
the waste management system, to the first equipment, like in a standard GN
Waste Management System GNDC-40A system, it is a vertical cuttings dryer
GNCD930D, which is the 4^th generation vertical cuttings dryer GN
designed and developed. This vertical cuttings dryer functions like a big
washing machine and helps to dry the cuttings. The liquid part falls down to a
tank and liquid in the tank waiting for being treated by a decanter centrifuge.
GNLW363CG-VFD is always an ideal high speed centrifuge to further treat the
mud, it is used to separate out the extra fine particles, and the drilling
liquid, very clean liquid falls directly back into the drilling system.

2. now how are
the drilling cuttings? yes, they are dry, but still not ready to be discharged.
GN is the first solids control manufacturer in China to design and produce a
set of solidification unit. That is used to make the drilling cuttings into
cakes and safe to be discharged.

If you have
interest in those technology or equipment, welcome to contact us freely.

Per decanter
centrifuge’s working principal, by high-G force of centrifugal force generated
by the high speed rotating centrifuge bowl, the solids particles are threw to
the outer layer inside the rotating bowl, the pushed by the impeller to the solids
discharge ports. Meanwhile, the liquid phase flows to the other direction and
discharged from the liquid discharge ports.

In this case, the
impeller’s material seems vital to the service life of the centrifuge, and the
protection of impeller is very necessary and different protection methods bring
different results.

Normally there
are several ways for impeller protection：

1. Spray welding:
it is a traditional and easy way to do the impeller protection and of a very
low cost. It provides around 1 mm height of protection, and the dynamic
balancing of impeller is done after doing the spray welding.

The advantage of
spray welding is low cost, disadvantage is that the welding layer is easy to be
worn out, and after the welding layer is worn out, the operator need to
re-balance the impeller after re-weld the protection. But in practice, most of
jobsites don’t have balancing machines.

Right now, most
of China solids control companies are still using spray welding for their
impeller protection.

2. ceramic tiles
for impeller protection: ceramic tiles are ideal protection for solids control
centrifuges, because they are of high anti-worn character. Comparing with spray
welding, ceramic tiles are equal in shape and size, when some pieces are worn
out an need to be changed, the operator just change the one and the opposite
one, no need to redo the dynamic balancing.

Advantage: no
need to redo the dynamic balancing when changing tiles, long service time because
of equal height of 4 mm, and high standard of anti-worn. Disadvantage: fragile
when installing onto the impeller, need more working hour for manufacturer for
installing.

GN Solids Control
use this kind of impeller protection on their economic configuration
centrifuges, which are normally used as solids control centrifuge.

3. tungsten
carbide tiles for impeller protection. It is now the internationally highest
standard impeller solution. The tungsten carbide tiles are of high hardness and
anti-corrosion characters. And they are of equally 4mm height.

Advantage: same
as ceramic tiles, no need to redo balancing after changing pieces, and more
anti-corrosive and anti-worn than ceramic, more suitable for waste management
centrifuges. Disadvantage: more expensive than the above 2 solutions.

GN Solids Control
use tungsten carbide tiles for GN high standard configuration of centrifuges,
first and best among China suppliers and of the highest international standard.

Since last year, the world petrol and gas
market has been down for a long while, at first, it was caused by the going
down of the crude oil price, and after more than 6 months, although the price
of crude oil was raised a bit, the expectation is still not so satisfactory to
encourage the drilling companies to come back to market.

Although under such economic background, GN
Solids Control has got orders from both domestic market and oversea market. Like
this order, it is about 6 sets centrifuges and 40 sets mud agitators, for a
drilling mud service company in South America.

Before, the oil relating industry was
always regarded as rich industry who always focusing on the most expensive
solutions. But since the down of crude oil price, the oil companies’ budget is
tight, and was radiated to service companies, forcing those companies to have
to look for most cost effective solutions. They still need highest quality
products, but with reasonable price. GN Solids Control, therefore, become their
best choice.

The end user is planning to use 6 mud
agitators to match one decanter centrifuge, and extra 4 sets of agitators as
back up. They are GNLW363CG-VFD decanter centrifuges, with VFD control panel
with PLC smart screens, with positive pressurized VFD control panel, the
international highest standard, and with the most popular bowl diameter size 14
inch.

Mud Agitator GNJBQ150DD, 15kw mud
agitators, with double layer impellers, GN mud agitator is compact designed mud
agitator, direct connection, easy to install and need small footprint.

Besides centrifuges and mud agitators, GN
has the complete line of equipments for solids control and waste management
systems, including shale shaker, mud cleaner, desander, desilter, mud gun, jet
mud mixer, and various pumps.

After the operation of those 6 sets
centrifuges, this end user is planning to add the qty to 10 sets and will try
GNCD930C vertical cuttings dryer in near future.