In the Africa, there are lots of kinds of resources, including gold and black gold, the crude oil. The wise African governments have foreseen the by-products of the crude oil explorations which have already happened in some other countries, the environmental problems. That’s why, along with the crude oil exploration drilling rigs, all rigs are requested to have a drilling waste management systems, especially for the drilling cuttings before disposal.
Talking about drilling cuttings, they are the discharge from a rig solids control system. As the shale shakers are removing most of the cuttings. Most cuttings requested to be treated by a waste management system are mainly from shale shakers. Depending on shale shaker’s own characters, the cuttings are bigger than 100 microns and the mixture is always wet.
1. A vertical cuttings dryer is always regarded as an efficient choice for the cuttings from oil based mud. GNCD930 series vertical cuttings dryers could make the cuttings OOC to be reduced to below 0.5%.
2. After the cuttings dryer, the cuttings become dryer and there is liquid to be collected to a catch tank. This drilling liquid always contains lots of chemicals, which is quite expensive. It would be economic if they can be reused in the drilling system. But still, there are fine particles in the liquid which should be removed. That’s why after the vertical cuttings dryer, clients always use GNLW363 decanter centrifuge for treating the liquid phase discharged from the cuttings dryer.
3. Feeding pumps. A decanter centrifuge could be fed by various pumps, among which most popular one is screw pump. Screw pump could be adjusted with VFD control panel and the transferring volume could be quite accurate.
4. Screw conveyors. GNSC series screw conveyors could be used to collect the cuttings from shale shaker, and also transfer cuttings to feed for the vertical cuttings dryer. By different layout and slopes, they can be used quite flexibly.
For this client, GN provided 2 sets of above mentioned equipment for his 2 rigs.