Hydraulic fracturing has been in practice in the oil and gas industry for over 65 years and has been used in more than one million wells to obtain 700 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion feet of natural gas. Recently, horizontal fracturing has been used as a major breakthrough technology in natural gas recovery from shale drilling. Currently, about 25% of U.S. gas supplies are from shale.  Hydraulic fracturing is increasingly becoming regulated by various state and federal environmental agencies.  Market forces are also pushing development toward greener technologies.  Major oil industry service companies like Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Schlumberger and Weatherford have begun to focus their efforts to develop and implement environmentally friendly and sustainable green technologies.  Baker Hughes is at the forefront of biotechnology in the oil services industry and has developed several enzymes that break the viscosity of cross-linked polymers used in hydraulic fracturing applications.    Baker Hughes supplies several environmentally friendly, patented enzyme breakers that were generated using natural processes.  Each enzyme shows high specificity and reduces the viscosity of cross-linked polymers and linear gels such as Guar, Starch, Cellulose and Xanthan.  These enzymes can also be used to reduce and remove filter-cake damage on formation faces and within proppant packs.  The enzymes function across a wide range of temperatures (140-250�F) and pH ranges (3-11).  The enzyme formulations can be customized and combined to expand treatment options and achieve optimum results.Recent advances in biotechnology and molecular microbiology have allowed these enzymes to be cloned and produced cheaply, quickly and in large quantities.  They have several advantages over conventional, oxidative breakers in that they do not damage equipment, they are miscible and they don't pose any significant health or environmental hazards.  Additionally, whereas traditional chemical breakers work in a stoichiometric fashion, enzymes are naturally regenerating catalysts and continue to 'clean up' the formation long after the treatment job is complete.

Development and application of green enzyme breaker technologies for hydraulic fracturing

244th National Meeting (2012)

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