Cementing Glasses for oil Well Applications

Venezuela has one of the biggest reserves of heavy crude oil on the world and the steam-injection is one of the techniques employed to extract these types of oil. Unfortunately, the conventional cementing materials used for the heavy crude oil wells do not show a good performance after two/three steam-injection cycles and the wells need be repaired several times, thus increasing the operation costs. Lately, the blast furnace slags are used as cementing material for these oil wells due to their thermal/chemical stability. Unfortunately, Venezuela does not produce these slags, so they are imported with their disadvantage associated, such as: the heterogeneous chemical composition, the amount of remaining crystalline phases and the elevated cost due to the blast furnace slag milling process. This research concerns the employment of a conventional glass production process to synthesize new amorphous materials with novel chemical compositions and high purity controls, which will be applied as new cementing materials for heavy crude oil wells. The characterization was made using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Disperse Spectroscopy (EDS), Thermal Gravimetric Analysis (TGA), Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD). Finally, a slurry formulation was made from the synthetic glasses and was compared with a commercial slag slurry in order to evaluate their thermal/mechanical behaviors.