Gilsonite performs comparably to sulfonated asphalt in water based mud systems at 25 to 50% lower cost. That claim is easy to make and harder to evidence, so this page sets out the field data behind it: two offshore Louisiana wells where the numbers were measured rather than estimated — a 36% reduction in torque, […]
Water based muds present a problem that oil based systems do not: gilsonite is a hydrocarbon, and hydrocarbons are not soluble in water. Adding untreated gilsonite to a WBM gives you a suspended solid, not a functioning additive. The answer is sulfonation — a chemical treatment that makes the material water dispersible while keeping the […]
