Posted on 02/10/2014 4:56:02 AM PST by thackney
Blake Scott, the founder and president of Scott Environmental Services, has developed a way to turn solid drilling waste into a material that can be used to pave oil field roads and rig pads. His Texas-based business, which recycles the waste in mud and drill cuttings, now operates in six other states. He described the work in a recent interview with FuelFix. Edited excerpts:
FuelFix: Where does the drilling waste you work with come from?
Scott: When you drill a well, the material you are drilling through is solid material, and is brought up by the drilling mud. It is separated, and the solid material is taken out is drill cuttings. Traditionally, drilling cuttings have been disposed? of either by being partially treated and spread out over a portion of land or they have been dragged off-site for disposal.
FuelFix: What inspired you to develop the recycling technology?
Scott: We began as an oil field contractor, loading material off- site. As we watched this, we thought that surely there is a value to this material, and began to look at other kinds of use. It had some properties that could create construction materials. We realized something could be created to let the operators reuse the material in roads and drill pads a well site requires. They would not have to pay for disposal, or buy new construction materials.
FuelFix: How did you develop the technology, and what challenges did you face?
Scott: We began by looking at the basic science behind turning the waste cuttings into material suitable for roads. It all hinges on the science of solidification and stabilization. The development of this idea took us several years. We had to do quite a bit of research on the materials and learn how to sequester the contaminants and what kind of geotechnical properties you need to create. It involves both civil engineering and environmental engineering.
To test the demands on these roads, we went out and counted the number of loads used to hook up a drilling rig, to better understand what we had to design and the traffic it would have to handle. For a road, how strong you can make it depends on the thickness of the material you use, and if you don’t get it right, it will fail. These problems mean that you could have deep imprints on the road from tire tracks, or that it could move and not be a stable structure.
FuelFix: How would you like to see your company grow?
Scott: We would like to be able to expand what we are offering geographically and expand our offerings from a service perspective. As drilling increases, operators will become more interested in making sure their waste is handled in a way they feel comfortable with.
One of the traditional methods of dealing with a lot of waste is to spread it over a large piece of property. But why would you do that? Why would you consume 20 acres of area, when you can take that material and reuse it to build your own drill pad or road? It is like the waste never existed if you are using it for your own construction purposes.
Excellent.
The really neat thing is that the road material glows at night so the truckers don’t ever drive off the road.....just kidding.
More disregard for the environment by the mean old oil companies !
< /leftist drivel >
Compounding the interest. Recycling the by-products of your primary production is the very essence of sustainable capitalism.
Similar to capturing the “waste heat” from a power plant to heat homes or use in a secondary process, and eventually allowing very little to escape to the surrounding environment.
This is pretty smart of the guy, if he can make money from it. Cuttings are nothing but finely crushed rock, though, so it’s not quite the difficult matter they make it out to be.
The “mud” he is referring to is actually a sophisticated multi-purpose fluid, custom designed for each hole (it’s not a well until it’s finished out)- but it looks like mud, so that’s what it’s called.
Never understood the leftist mind. Plenty of them I have seen have expressed how much they dislike oil. Ironically, one of them asked what that marvelous ingredient I was able to use to waterproof a box for a controlled humidity in a greenhouse experiment, turns out that nut failed to realize where asphalt comes from. Asphalt is good stuff for sealing out water BTW, so long as it doesn’t freeze.
Landfills have been using it for cover. They don’t have to use as much topsoil
let me also add that as a Texas Boy he should know better than to say what he did, the RRC does nor require us to remove the material. There are specific guidelines as to how we deal with reserve pits and none of it requires removing material from the site. Some states are different, NM won’t even let me dig pits so I use shell shakers and steel mud pits. This might make a little sense in that process.
We began as an oil field contractor, loading material off- site. As we watched this, we thought that surely there is a value to this material, and began to look at other kinds of use.
Im no expert on drilling mud, but I tend to relate drilling mud with clay, and I tend to relate clay with slippery when wet.
Industrial furnace slag works better than crushed limestone for covering a long dirt farm driveway.Cheaper too.
Some companies are making money doing this as well.
Drilling mud can definitely be slippery- in fact, a substance is sometimes added to “flush” the hole that is extremely viscous and slippery (and white in color- yes, it has an obscene slang term attached to it).
Ground rock sounds fairly inorganic...
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