A Low Cost High Temperature Seawater-Based Guar Gum Fracturing Fluid

In offshore fracturing operation, formulating a fracturing fluid with fresh water results in high transportation cost and long time of formulation. If seawater is used to formulate the fracturing fluid, a large amount of chelating agents which crosslink in alkaline environment shall be used, and this results in high material cost, while the ability of the fracturing fluid formulated to resist high temperature may not be satisfactory. To solve this problem, an organic titanium zirconium crosslinking agent is stepwise synthesized with reactants tetra-isopropyl titanate and zirconium sulphate etc. Characterization of the reaction product with NMR and SEM (after precipitation of the crosslinking agent) shows that the crosslinking agent is an organic chelating agent. The particle sizes of the crosslinking agent are distributed in a range of 1 nm to 100 nm, as measured with dynamic and static synchronous laser scattering instrument, and this indicates that the crosslinking agent has excellent reactivity. This crosslinking agent can crosslink in neutral conditions, a good property for formulating fracturing fluids with high salinity waters such as seawater. The microstructure of the crosslinking product is a stable honeycomb-like hexagonal grid structure. With this organic titanium-zirconium crosslinking agent, the fracturing fluids formulated have better viscoelasticity than the fracturing fluids formulated with crosslinking agents containing only titanium. The high temperature resistance of the fracturing fluids formulated using the organic titanium-zirconium crosslinking agent is 180 ℃. Field application of this new crosslinking agent in formulating a fracturing fluid with seawater for fracturing a high temperature well of CNOOC in south China Sea has obtained good results.