Lost circulation refers to the loss of a part or whole drilling fluid into the formation and is considered as one of the most challenges in drilling operations. It could be occurred either naturally in highly fractured formations or induced by excessive overbalance pressure which leads to crack and rupture the formations being drilling and thereby inducing the loss of the mud into them. There are a number of treatments for lost circulation and perhaps the using of lost circulation materials (LCMs) is one of the common treatments. LCM is any material that used as an additive in the drilling fluid to seal and plug the openings in the formations. LCM manufacturers are continually introducing hundreds of materials every year. Recently, many research and studies had been done and continue for developing and investigating natural LCMs as alternatives for the conventional LCMs. In this study, a pomegranate peel (PP) has been developed and evaluated to be used as a natural LCM. The main two advantages of the PP LCM over the conventional LCM are its cost and naturally friendly properties. A series of filtration tests has been conducted on various sizes and concentrations of PP in order to investigate the effects of the size and percent of the additive on lost control characteristics. Moreover, for the purpose of comparison, a number of filtration tests has been conducted for similar sizes and precents of one of the most used LCM, carbonate calcium. It has been observed that the filtrate rate for the reference mud was 32 ml/30 min. While, the optimum reduction of 81% of the filtrate has been gained by addition of 15 ppb of the fine sized (less than 75 microns) PP. Meanwhile, only 47% of the lost being control through the addition of 20 ppb of the fine sized carbonate calcium.
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Jaf et al. (2023) studied this question.
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