With the world demanding ever more challenging ‘green’ credentials, the search is on among oil industry suppliers to come up with environmentally safer alternatives to existing products. Jennifer Pallanich talks to Terresolve CEO Mark Miller about the ‘roughneck and roustabout proof’ bio-based fluids his company has been developing for offshore use.
Chemical engineers design fluids with use in mind. ‘What it really depends on is what you need it to do,’ Mark Miller, CEO of Terresolve, says. Some fluids need to withstand temperatures as high as 400°F or as low as –80°C while others must perform in wet or dirty conditions.
Fluids working in hot temperature environments often have antioxidants and fluid improvers while their cold-weather counterparts will require cold-flow improvers and pour point depressants. Fluids used in wet applications frequently need hydrolytic stabilizers, while those operating in dirty conditions contain detergency and dispersancy. Lubricants used for the offshore oil & gas industry frequently face all of these conditions.
‘You really have to build or engineer a quality lubricant,’ says Miller, who has a chemical engineering background and is one of the company’s founders. ‘There’s a balance, a real art and science to crafting a high-performance fluid.’
Any fluid going offshore, Miller says, has ‘to be bullet proof. It must work under all sorts of conditions.’ Longevity and the ability to protect the equipment are crucial characteristics of a successful fluid. Other vital qualities include anti-foaming, anti-rust, anti-oxidation, anti-hydrolysis and anti-wear. The offshore industry has a host of needs in its fluids intended for use on rotating equipment, tensioners, cranes, top drives and winches. The fluids have to be ‘roughneck and roustabout proof’ so the fluids will perform even if they become dirty or contaminated, he adds.
Terresolve’s readily biodegradable fluids are made from an environmentallysafe base synthetic base oils that can withstand heat, water and contamination. The fluids can withstand such conditions because of the way the base oils are combined with performance chemistry modifiers, Miller says. According to Miller, Terresolve’s bio-fluids offer improved performance, are environmentally safe and have reduced compressibility at depth.
When Terresolve’s chemists and chemical engineers create a new fluid, they start with a function and operating environment and choose a base fluid, such as fully refined synthetic oil or vegetable oils. ‘Each fluid has different features and benefits and limitations,’ Miller says. After that, it’s time to select performance additives, such as oxidation, antifoaming agents, wear protectants, detergents and other performance compounds. The final formula must be compatible not only with itself and other lubricants but must also be compatible with hoses, seals, elastomers and other system components, Miller notes. Finally, it must possess the overall performance level required of the equipment and meet the specifications and approvals of the original equipment manufacturers.
Freezing conditions
Terresolve has just wrapped up Arctic testing on EnviroLogic 3046, a member of its EnviroLogic 3000 line of synthetic high-performance readily biodegradable and non-toxic hydraulic fluids. In early April, the company was working on the technical report of the test results for the EL3046 fluid. In the first test, in early April, Terresolve froze the fluid taken to –57°C for a week, then brought it back to room temperature. ‘It was crystal clear,’ Miller says. ‘It was perfect. None of the performance characteristics changed.’
In the second test, Terresolve took the lubricants down to –80°C – the temperature at which the lubricant will freeze – for one week, then thawed it. During the thawing process, Terresolve photographed and visually inspected the lubricants at every 10°C warming interval up to room temperature. The fluid was then dropped back to –80°C again for a repeat of the thaw cycle. Miller says the fluid, when measured against specific performance parameters, ‘lost none of its lubricating or oxidative properties. It’s designed to be extremely durable.’
The results of the tests show that operators can close down Arctic operations in the winter but leave oil in the system. When the systems are fired up again in spring, they will continue to operate at optimum performance levels, Miller says. ‘This is a key differentiator from petroleum oils, which tend to have phase separation and additive dropout when going from frozen to thawed.’
‘We do quite a bit of work in arctic type conditions already,’ Miller notes, saying he expects to see more work for drilling rigs as well as orders associated with the number of icebreakers being built for arctic operations and for the maritime transportation industry. ‘There are a lot more people going over the top of the globe and through the arctic region than ever before.’
Right application
Inappropriately transferring a lubricant from one industry to another can result in problems, Miller says. ‘Some of the earliest environmentally safe fluids did not perform as desired. The mindset resulting from early failures is a challenge Terresolve still faces – overcoming early failures of the knuckleheads, and I use that term affectionately.’
Once a lubricant is properly designed for one application, it is vital to ensure it can be appropriately used in a different application, Miller cautions. For example, he says, Terresolve produces the bio-based fluids EnviroLogic 100 series of hydraulic fluids intended for light-duty use, such as on the mowers on golf courses. ‘These fluids work well for that situation but wouldn’t last an hour on an offshore rig,’ he says. If a lubricant is applied in an inappropriate setting, problems arise, and those problems could be magnified if it’s a first-time use of a new technology. ‘Once operators hear a product category fails, they’ll never look at it again,’ he says. ‘Once bitten, twice shy.’
Even so, people with concerns about performance seem more open to using environmentally-friendlier fluids than a decade ago, when the biofluids had a very short track record. ‘The industry has gotten more aware from an environmental perspective. Workers in the industry recognize the benefit of biodegradable oils and are looking to find alternatives that are cleaner and greener,’ Miller says.
Greenwashing has hit many products, Miller says, and he urges people to be alert to a term promoting products that may be a bit misleading. His peeve, he says, is the use of the phrase ‘inherently biodegradable’ as a selling point. As Miller puts it, everything is ‘inherently biodegradable’. The phrase, he says, simply means a propensity to degrade.
It upsets him when such terms are used by others to market fluids as green fluids when they’re ‘standard petroleum products,’ he says. The result could be ‘a well-meaning though uninformed client’ not getting what is actually desired, he adds.
The term he says is important is ‘readily biodegradable’ and ASTM International, formerly known as the American Society for Testing & Materials (ASTM), and Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) have both outlined two main methods on how to test the biodegradability of fluids. The 21-day test is concerned with primary degradation and is calculated using a measurement of the starting and ending amounts of the substance. The 28-day test is focused on ultimate degradation. To earn the use of the ‘readily biodegradable’ term, 80% of the sample must biodegrade in the three-week test or 60% in the fourweek test, Miller says.
Terresolve faces another challenge: existing lubricants technology still works. Getting companies ‘to change from something that has worked to something that is better is very difficult,’ Miller says. He acknowledges his company’s synthetic products are more expensive per unit, maybe even by twice as much. But, he says, ‘they are going to last probably three to four times as long. If you take care of it, it will last five to six times as long.’
Once customers decide to invest in synthetic fluids, Miller says, they tend to increase their focus on maintenance. ‘Operators and workers take better care of the system when they are using a premium product. They tighten up the system, watch it more carefully.’ Miller calls the enhanced maintenance focus a halo effect and says the positive upward spiral can pay off for customers in savings beyond the lowered frequency of fluid changes.
Terresolve first supplied the offshore industry with its EnviroLogic 3000 fluids in 1998, but it wasn’t until four years later that the company started making inroads by winning a place on the central hydraulic system for Transocean’s Deepwater Nautilus and a similar project for Diamond Offshore.
Noble Drilling, another early adopter of biofluids, had seen some issues with a synthetic ester fluid forming acids and harming equipment when it got wet or overheated in field operations. Terresolve worked with NOV’s crane crew and got the EL3068 fluid qualified for use on NOV’s cranes on several Noble Drilling rigs. During the trial phase, Miller says, which started in August 2009, Terresolve’s fluid was placed on four cranes on three different rigs for a six-month period, with fluid performances tracked. The fluid is still being used on these rigs.
Despite contamination and water, Miller says, the fluid held up, and now Terresolve is working to supply the fluid to cranes on the rest of Noble Drilling’s fleet. Testing has expanded to include thrusters.
Miller says Terresolve is also working to convert some systems on a Seadrill newbuild rig in the Gulf of Mexico. OE
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