If you are familiar with oil service industry, you must know about drilling waste management systems, which is mainly about 3 kinds of treatments: drilling cuttings treatment, drilling fluids treatment and oily sludge treatment. Among which the drilling cuttings treatment was most commonly requested by laws and regulations.

GN Solids Control is a professional solution provider for above mentioned 3 applications, and recently, GN Solids Control just finished the delivery of a drilling cuttings waste management system including 2 decanter centrifuges and 1 vertical cuttings dryer. Normally, for OBM or SBM’s drilling waste management, there should be a vertical cuttings dryer. In fact, the vertical cuttings dryer is specially designed for the OBM’s drilling cuttings, which can reduce the OOC to 5%. After the vertical cuttings dryer, the liquid phase still contains some fine particles. Those particles could be removed by a high speed decanter centrifuge before being returned to the clean mud tank.

In this system there are following features:

1. A GNCD930 vertical cuttings dryer is located in a container which is easy to be transported by land or by sea. Meanwhile, a well isolated container can keep the vertical cuttings dryer to operate in a comparably warmer condition during winter.
2. There are 2 sets of decanter centrifuges in this system, one for solids control, the other for the OBM drilling cuttings. Traditionally, there are 4 steps solids control in a solids control system, the shale shaker, desander and desilter cones, then the centrifuge. Nowadays, more and more clients are choosing decanter centrifuge to replace the cyclones and put them directly after the shale shaker (sometimes 2 decanter centrifuges are used for solids control, a middle speed one plus a high speed one, although in this project the client uses 1 set for solids control only). And the 2^nd set of centrifuge is used after the GNCD930 for drilling fluids treatment.

Here are some working videos of similar projects to show more information.

https://www.gnsolidscontrol.com/drilling-video

When talking about oil and gas drilling, there is one type of equipment we can never by-pass, which is shale shaker. Shale shaker is located at the first place of a complete solids control system. GN Solids Control has just finished the manufacturing for some dual motion shale shakers for an offshore drilling company.

1. Dual motional shakers. According to the motional type of the shale shaker, the shale shaker could be divided into several types: linear motional, oval motional and dual motional one, as the model GN just provided to this offshore drilling company. This motional means the motion route of the drilling cuttings on the shaker screens during operation, which determines the time the cuttings spend on screens and the positions they fall on screens. GN Solids Control has also linear motional shakers available.

2. GN shaker models. GN Solids Control has various shaker models for option based on different treating capacities, including mini shaker with 2 shaker screens GNZS752F shale shaker, the normal shakers with 3 or 4 pieces of screens, GNZS703F and GNZS594F, with screen size as 2.63m2 and 2,73m2, and double deck shale shaker GNZS706F which can use 2 different screen API’s, the coarse ones on top deck while fine ones on bottom deck in order to achieve a larger capacity.

3. GN High-G shakers. Besides the normal shale shakers used for drilling rig solids control purpose, GN Solids Control also has High G drying shakers available. The high-G drying shakers are used for treating the drilling cuttings collected from the shakers’ discharged material, mainly for water based mud. For the high-G models, GN has models based on GNZS703 and GNZS594, and the vibrating G force can reach upto 8.5. For the similar purpose, the drilling cuttings treatment, GN has GNCD930 vertical cuttings dryer for oil based mud and SBM
For more information, please contact GN directly.

Such as all other drillings, the diamond drilling is also in need of drilling mud treatment. Because of the project features that the diamond drilling jobsites are always located in different places, and the drilling machine is not so big, the compact equipment is more preferred than large ones.

Also, based on the particle size and requested separation results, the decanter centrifuges are always quite popular among end users, that’s why for the diamond drilling projects, the most popular equipment GN provided to clients are GNLW223 Decanter centrifuges. Each year, GN make and sell 30+ sets of this centrifuge model to different countries in the world.

Besides the decanter centrifuge, some clients prefers a complete mud system with several functions including coarse separation, fine separation and mud preparation by using a mud mixing hopper. Just recently, GN Solids Control has provided to a client in Chile with a complete mud recycling system for diamond drilling, including following equipment:

1. Shale shaker or first step separation. Considering the compact structure and requested treating capacity, for this system GN chooses the GNZS752F shale shaker as the first step separation, with a 1.35m2 screen area with 2 pieces of composite frame screens.

2. Decanter centrifuge. Here a high speed decanter centrifuge is used for separating out the particles from 2 to 5 microns.

3. Mud mixing hopper, which is used for adding new chemicals or lost components into the drilling mud. The mud mixing hopper and decanter centrifuge can share one pump, alternatively serving for feeding centrifuge or mixing purpose.

On client’s request, GN also matches a generator for the whole system on the same skid of the mud tank.
If you need such equipment or solutions, please contact GN Sales Team directly.

Oily sludge treatment systems are quite important solutions for the oil and gas industry, especially for the refineries. A professional solution can help the contractor to separate the oil, water and solids, and finally reuse the water, recycle the oil and reduce the solids discharge’s volume and damage for the environment.

Based on the requested treating capacity, GN Solids Control designed 3 models of OST systems GNOST-01, GNOST-05 and GNOST-15. All three models are combined by 3 steps for separation, with only difference as each equipment capacities. The treating procedures are functioned by following steps:

1. Shale shaker. Shale shaker can take out the most particles in the sludge by using suitable screen mesh sizes. In case the sludge has a high viscosity or the oil is wrapping on the solids so tightly, we can use pre-heating facilities and pre mixing for the sludge to break the linkage between the oil and solids for easier separation.

2. Decanter centrifuge. Decanter centrifuge is used to remove the particles from 2 to 5 microns with a high rotating speed, comparing with other equipment to separation, the decanter centrifuge is quite efficient and the separation is thoroughly.

3. After the decanter centrifuge, there should be a disc stack or a three phase centrifuge for the separation of oil, water and solids. Here before entering this step, the solids particles become no quite a lot. The main function is to separate the water from oil.

Here, for this client in Beijing, GN Solids Control provided a system of GNOST-15, including a GNZS594F shale shaker, a big bowl centrifuge GNLW-554ET and a three phase centrifuge GNSX-554ET. And there is a chemical dosing unit together with the whole system and preheating and pre-mixing devices before the sludge comes into shale shaker and decanter centrifuge.