In this paper, a novel method for geopolymer-based composite in use in offshore deep water oil well cementation is described. This innovative approach is based on the mixing of epoxy resin and dilution to a geopolymer suspension, when both polymerization reactions are just started. By using this new approach, geopolymer-resin composites have been characterized by compressive strength, Young's modulus, thickening time, hydration heat and scanning electron microscopy analysis. This innovative material makes the geopolymer-based composites applicable for oil well cementation in deep water condition, which also showed high early-term compressive strength, low density and adjustable thickening time.
Oil well construction in offshore deep water environments causes lots of challenges from a cementation perspective. Limited options for controlling of cement early-term strength and density lead to significant risks to wellbore stability. In addition, there is a durability concern of cement sheath under deep water strata stress wave condition.
Pozzolanic materials, including metakaolin, fly ash, and blast furnace slag, has been widely used as a substitute to Portland cement in construction engineering (Bu, 2016). These materials have plenty of wonderful properties, including low manufacturing energy consumption, high compressive strength at high temperature, acid resistance, low density, as well as environmental sustainability (Gartner, 2004; Zhang, 2008). For these reasons, the application of pozzolanic material-based geopolymer covers many fields like utilized as coating material on steel to resist corrosion, as high temperature resistant materials, as low energy consumption foam tiles, etc.
However, in the applications of oil well construction, due to the high reactivity of geopolymer leads to nonadjustable thickening time at room temperature and the slow early-term strength development at low temperature in deep water condition, the geopolymer-based materials are barely used (Perná, 2016). The bottleneck issue which confined the utilizing of geopolymer-based material in deep water wells is the slow reaction speed of cross linking reaction of geopolymer-based materials at low temperatures. This problem could solve by accelerating the reaction speed and the early strength development of geopolymer-based materials. The curing reaction of epoxy resin is not much sensitive to temperatures compared to geopolymer-based materials (Srisuwan, 2014). Meanwhile, in the field of construction industry, many researches have been done on the geopolymer-resin materials. These materials show homogeneous microdispersion and greatly improved strength (Ferone, 2013; Roviello, 2015; Zhang, 2010).
