Q&A: Oil field leftovers don’t go to waste

Fuel Fix ^ | February 9, 2014 | Emily Pickrell

[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.

[Paladin2]

Both are INORGANIC.

Ground as in ground-up.

[EERinOK]

I am tying to figure that out too.

I just roughed out 10000 feet of 8.75” hole and another 10000 feet of 6.25” hole, recovering say 100% usable rock. that would be a typical Bakken horizontal. One could never recover 100% of the cuttings as usable, some are ground to dust, but that might be offset by out of gauge hole.

that’s right at 6300 ft3 of material. If the road is 16 ft wide and had 2 ft of fill, then you could make 200 ft of road. or a 60 by 60 foot pad, enough to park the drillers trailers, but not build a location.

I am not against innovation & business ventures in the patch, but I’m really struggling with how this makes anyone a buck.