Paper: Glenn Penny and Tom Pursley, CESI Chemical a Flotek Company, David L. Holcomb, Pentagon Technical Services

The development and application of a unique series of environmentally friendly microemulsion additives over the past four years has shown success in thousands of oil and gas wells in the U.S. and Canada. Microemulsions, while not new fundamentally, have been formulated to become stable nanostructures dispersed in either oil or water based fluids so that they do not actively dilute and activate upon contact with a surface, such as reservoir rock or other targeted liquid or solid, thereby providing via ultra-low interfacial tension, an optimum mechanism for significantly improved efficiency for dewatering of coal-bed methane wells; formation damage prevention or removal in fracturing or acidizing systems; H2S mitigation in a variety of remedial pumping operations including stimulation, wellbore and fluid invasion protection for drilling fluids, particularly in underbalanced conditions.Specific laboratory and scientific background information, with numerous case histories from around the Western and Eastern U.S. oil and gas fields will be presented for each of the categories above. They will demonstrate process enhancement using microemulsion additives both in standalone as well as in providing improvements to other regularly used technologies. Comparisons showing their successful use versus current technologies will be made.