Rheology and flow studies of drag-reducing gravel packing fluids

Viscoelastic additives are widely used as drag reducers in the oil and gas industry, and both polymeric additives and micellar surfactants are commonly used in well gravel packing applications. While the behaviour of polymeric additives such as the polysaccharide xanthan gum is well characterized in the literature, much less is known about how the rheology of the viscoelastic surfactants affects drag reduction, despite widespread use. In this study, we performed a number of rheological tests as well as flow loop experiments on solutions of a zwitterionic surfactant to understand the structural characteristics of the fluids in order to make better process predictions. Unlike xanthan, which displays typical viscoelastic liquid characteristics, zwitterionic surfactant-based fluids display elastic gel-like behaviour. The gel-like behaviour suggests long and relatively unbreakable chain lengths of the wormlike micelles in the viscoelastic surfactant solution at room temperature leading to gelation by entanglement. Also, a shear-thickening behaviour of viscoelastic surfactant samples at higher shear rates is observed, possibly as a result of shear-induced structures. Finally, we present a novel representation scheme to depict the flow loop results for drag in the laminar and turbulent regime, and relate this data to the rheological characterization.