GN Solids Control has rich experiences in drilling solids control and manufactures a complete series of equipment for the solids control related works. Automatic tank cleaning system is one of the equipment to clean mud tanks in a very efficient and cost-effective way.
There are huge amount of mud tanks in the drilling industry. With different type of well to be drilled, mud tanks need to be cleaned to avoid cross contamination, say mud tanks containing residuals of water-based mud may contaminate oil based mud if the water based mud is not cleaned thoroughly.
Usually this type of work is done manually. Workers have to wear heavy protection clothes and step into the mud tanks, which may contain toxic gas inside, so the workers have to wear masks too. This process is quite labor intensive. As it takes 4 to 6 hours for 6 people to clean mud tanks, the cost is pretty high, in addition to the dangers the workers are exposed to. As it takes about 1 day to have the tank cleaned, efficiency is quite low.
GN Solids control is aware of this challenge and is determined to help the industry to overcome this challenge. It developed an automatic mud tanks cleaning system, which has the following advantages:
- Secure the safety of the workers. With GN Solids Control’s automatic tank cleaning system, there is no need for human to be exposed to the dangerous working environment, all they need to do is to have mount the tank cleaning machine in the mud tanks, that is it;
- Greatly increased efficiency. Typical cleaning time with the automatic tank cleaning system is about 30 minutes, and 1 hour with equipment deployment and retraction. This is less than 10% of the time needed for manual operation. That means the mud tanks can be ready to be used in one hour, compared to one day with labor cleaning. This can greatly reduce the cost to use mud tanks and drilling rigs do not need to have that many mud tanks as before;
The automatic tank cleaning system by GN Solids Control will change the horizon of mud tank cleaning.