Sand Control Using Organic Acid Catalysed Resin

Recent resin injection for sand consolidation in the oil wells can give up to 600-700 psia of the compressive strength (Wasnik, Mete, & Ghosh, 2005). This would be enough to withstand high pressure from the formations and drilling activities in short period of time. However, resin injection alone is not effective to produce long lasting permanent result. Catalyst need to be added together with the resin injection to enhance the consolidation treatment. Resin injection alone also takes longer period to cure and hardened. Hence, addition of catalyst into the treatment is crucial to reduced curing time. Previous resin treatment on multi layered formation in Peninsular Malaysia has used Hydrochloric acid (HCl) as the catalyst (Keith et al., 2013). Unfortunately, strong acid like Hydrochloric acid cause serious corrosion problems to the equipment. Acetic acid which is an organic acid is chose as the main catalyst for the resin injection treatment. An experiment was conducted to determine the effectiveness of Acetic acid as main catalyst for epoxy resin in formation sand consolidation treatment. Parameters tested were curing time, permeability and compressive strength. The experiment considers whether Acetic acid catalysed resin could give high curing rate, high compressive strength and also better permeability to the consolidated sand. Results obtained for curing test is economical viable as the resin cured in less than 24 hour. Permeability test for organic acid catalysed resin produced good results as 4 of the samples permeability values are in the range of normal formation permeability which is 0-500 md. While, the rest 5 samples recorded values greater than 500 md. For compression test, all samples indicates results of greater than 700 psi which is better than previous uncatalysed resin treatment.