Product Details

Bentonite

1. Product Overview

Bentonite is a natural clay mineral widely used as a key base material for drilling fluids. It features excellent water absorption, swelling, suspension, and wall-building properties. It effectively enhances mud viscosity, stabilizes borehole walls, prevents collapse, and improves drilling efficiency, making it an essential material in oil and gas exploration and development.

2. Appearance & Technical Specifications

Core Technical Parameters

3. Core Functions

3.1 Adsorption & Viscosity Enhancement

It absorbs large amounts of water to form a high-viscosity colloid, effectively filling borehole fractures and maintaining drilling fluid stability and viscosity. It also adsorbs contaminants, keeping the mud clean.

3.2 Lubrication & Anti-Sticking

Acting as an excellent lubricant, it reduces friction between the drill pipe and borehole wall, preventing sticking and borehole collapse, and extending bit service life.

3.3 Wall Building & Wellbore Stabilization

Strengthens the mud’s wall-building ability, forming a robust, low-permeability filter cake that prevents fluid loss and borehole collapse, ensuring safe drilling operations.

4. Product Application

· Primary base material for water-based drilling fluids

· Enhancing cuttings-carrying capacity and improving drilling efficiency

· Stabilizing borehole walls and preventing formation collapse

· Used in oil and gas exploration, geotechnical engineering, and other related fields

5. Product Advantages

✅ Environmentally Friendly & SafeNon-toxic and pollution-free, fully compliant with environmental protection requirements.

✅ Excellent Water Absorption & SwellingHigh expansion capacity in water, providing strong suspension and cuttings-carrying performance.

✅ Strong Impermeability & Wellbore StabilityForms a dense filter cake to prevent borehole collapse and ensure drilling safety.

✅ High Temperature ResistanceMaintains stable bonding and adhesion at high temperatures, ensuring consistent drilling fluid performance.

6. Packaging Specification

· Standard: 25 kg/bag in woven bags, paper-plastic composite bags, or bulk bags.

· Customizable packaging specifications are available according to client requirements.

7. Storage & Transportation

Store in a dry, cool, and ventilated warehouse during storage and transportation. Protect the product from moisture to prevent caking and maintain its performance.

8. Disclaimer & Technical Support

All specifications and descriptions in this document are for reference only. The product shall be used in accordance with the customer’s actual working conditions and technical requirements. Customized formulations and solutions are available upon request.

Application Cases of Bentonite for Drilling Fluids

1.  High-quality Mud Making & Cuttings Carrying Case for Shallow Vertical Wells

Case Background: Conventional shallow vertical wells feature loose surface formations, fast drilling speed and large cuttings generation. Simple water drilling lacks viscosity and shear force, resulting in poor cuttings carrying capacity, easy accumulation of bottom hole cuttings, high risk of sand settling and stuck pipe, and unstable wellbore wall, which affects continuous drilling operation.

Application Formula & Dosage: High-purity sodium-based bentonite was added at 3.0%–5.0% in the initial water-based drilling fluid system. Through full hydration and pre-swelling, a stable base mud system was formed, matched with small amount of polymer additives to optimize rheological parameters.

Application Effect: Bentonite fully hydrates to form a colloidal network structure, which effectively improves the viscosity and gel strength of drilling fluid, greatly enhances suspension and cutting carrying capacity. It completely solves the problems of bottom hole sand settling and cuttings accumulation. The formed thin and dense mud cake stabilizes loose surface wellbore, avoids wellbore collapse and hole shrinkage, ensures continuous and efficient drilling of shallow wells, and reduces downhole complex risks.

2. Suspension & Fluid Stabilization Case for Solid-free Drilling Fluid in Desert Oilfields

Case Background: Desert oilfield drilling is featured with dry climate, fast water evaporation, severe drilling fluid performance attenuation, and easy layering and solid-liquid separation. Solid-free drilling fluid has poor suspension performance, heavy settlement of functional additives and weighting materials, unstable fluid performance, which seriously affects downhole pressure balance and wellbore cleaning effect.

Application Method & Dosage: Modified high-swelling bentonite was added at 2.0%–3.0% as the suspension and rheology regulator. It forms a reversible gel network in the drilling fluid system to improve the suspension stability of the system.

Application Effect: The bentonite network structure has excellent shear thinning and static suspension properties. It maintains low viscosity during circulating drilling to reduce pump pressure and friction, and forms gel structure statically to suspend solid particles stably, completely avoiding material settlement and system layering. The drilling fluid performance is stable for a long time, which effectively guarantees the safety and stability of desert open-hole long-cycle drilling.

3. Wellbore Protection & Fluid Loss Reduction Case for Offshore Extended-reach Wells

Case Background: Offshore extended-reach wells have ultra-long open-hole sections, long soaking time and severe wellbore hydration instability. Conventional drilling fluid systems have poor film-forming property, large high-temperature and high-pressure fluid loss, easy filtrate invasion into the formation, resulting in shale hydration spalling and wellbore enlargement, which increases tripping resistance and stuck pipe risk.

Application Dosage: 2.5%–3.5% high-quality drilling-grade bentonite was pre-hydrated and added to the offshore environmental-friendly drilling fluid system, cooperating with fluid loss reducers to optimize mud cake quality.

Application Effect: Fully hydrated bentonite particles are uniformly dispersed in the system, forming a continuous, thin, dense and flexible filter cake on the wellbore surface. It significantly reduces drilling fluid filtration, effectively isolates water and formation contact, inhibits shale hydration and dispersion, and controls wellbore enlargement rate within a reasonable range. It optimizes downhole lubrication conditions, reduces tripping and casing running resistance, and ensures smooth construction of offshore long horizontal section wells.

4. Anti-pollution & System Stabilization Case for Salt-gypsum Formations

Case Background: Salt-gypsum formations have high salinity and strong ion interference, which easily cause conventional bentonite to flocculate and agglomerate, resulting in sharp increase of drilling fluid viscosity, deteriorated fluid loss performance, system instability, and frequent wellbore shrinkage and leakage problems, restricting safe drilling of salt-bearing formations.

Application Method & Effect: Anti-salt modified bentonite was applied at 3.0%–4.0% in saturated brine drilling fluid systems. It has strong anti-ion interference ability and stable hydration expansion performance in high-salt environments, no flocculation or deterioration. It can stably adjust drilling fluid rheology, maintain good filter cake quality, effectively resist salt layer dissolution and formation pollution, and realize long-term stable drilling in salt-gypsum formations.

5. Wellbore Protection Auxiliary Case for Downhole Plugging Pre-slurry Construction

Case Background: In fractured and leakage-prone formations, direct plugging construction easily causes drilling fluid system disturbance, wellbore wall damage and secondary collapse. The conventional plugging slurry has poor wall adhesion and low stability, resulting in poor plugging pretreatment effect and low one-time plugging success rate.

Application Method & Effect: Pre-hydrated bentonite base mud with a dosage of 2.0%–3.0% is used as plugging pre-slurry. It has strong wall adhesion and good wellbore fitting performance, which can form a protective isolation layer on the wellbore wall in advance. It avoids wellbore damage during plugging construction, stabilizes downhole working conditions, cooperates with plugging materials to improve plugging compactness, and significantly improves the success rate of one-time leakage control in complex leakage formations.