DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN PROPPANT MODIFICATION PROCESSES

Abstract

The widespread use of hydraulic fracturing technology and the growing need for the use of proppants for the production of hard-to-recover hydrocarbon maintains interest in active research of proppant materials, methods of their effective use, and modification methods in order to improve their technological characteristics. Today, quite small volumes of such well-studied propping materials as sand and alumina are still in use. Every year the proppants market is increasingly replenished primarily with ceramic materials modified taking into account geological and technical conditions. The growth in consumption of proppants creates an urgent need to create new proppants with sufficiently large reserves of raw materials for their production. This determines the need to actively search for new ways to purposefully change the properties of materials to obtain an optimal combination of proppants characteristics that meet the key requirements for their properties in the processes of increasing the productivity of low-productive reservoirs. To ensure effective hydrocarbon production by hydraulic fracturing in modern wells, it is necessary to take into account the specifics of various combinations of reservoir conditions, which places special demands on the characteristics of the new forms of proppants being created that have the widest possible range of useful qualities. Improving one or more properties of proppants for already known natural materials, the use of modifying techniques that reform their basic qualities, or the creation of new synthetic materials, coatings, impregnations to improve their operating parameters can solve the issues of optimizing the efficient and sustainable operation of production equipment, and manage the oil production strategy in mature wells, as well as increase the energy saving of the process and reduce the adverse impact on the environment.