COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LOCAL BARITE AND IMPORTED AS WEIGHTING AGENT IN DRILLING FLUIDS: A REVIEW

Nigeria is blessed with a considerably large deposit of solid minerals, of which barite is one of it. The industrial need for barite has increased over the period as oil and gas exploration and exploitation grew because barite is used as a weighting agent in drilling fluids. Though, this is not the only application of barite. This resulted in the massive importation of barite for use by oil and gas firms operating in Nigeria. However, we sit on a deposit of barite, and we also import it, losing high foreign exchange earnings owing to some studies that revealed that Nigeria has low grade barite which is not meeting up with the API’s specification. In fact, some deposits of barite have not been explored for first time. This review paper has revealed a good number of studies done by researchers in the recent past, showing the rheological properties of local barite measuring up the imported ones and the API’s specific gravity is 4.2 and some works reviewed showed high grade barite have specific gravity (S.G) of 4.2 and little above. The previous studies showed that drilling mud treated with local barites have the required rheological properties for safe drilling operation. The fluid loss property of local barite is a little lower that the API standard and the imported barites but improved when 10 g Torkula barite was used to enhance the filter cake quality and reduce the fluid loss (Afolayan, et al., 2021). This review will serve as a boost to Government’s and agencies’ efforts to go full ball into extraction and processing barite in Nigeria to bridge the gap in the supply chain of local barite in Nigerian oil and gas industry in order to increase foreign exchange earnings.
Keywords: Barite, Drilling fluid, Specific Gravity, Weighting Agent and API Specification.