Oil production in Rec?ncavo Baiano, Brazil, generates circa 13,000tons of drilling cuttings each year. As the environmental awareness rises in Brazil, oil companies started to look for environmental sound technologies to account for this residue. An experimental programme has been devised to encapsulate the constituents of drilling cuttings. This process employs cation and anion exchange capacity of natural clayey soils to adsorb barite and chloride, and a thermal process to volatize the organic constituents of the drilling fluid and stabilize the adsorbed constituents. In practice, the experimental programme consisted of a batch of geotechnical, mineralogical and chemical tests in order to evaluate the capacity of three different clayey soils from Rec?ncavo Baiano to encapsulate drilling cuttings. The main objective was to use the encapsulated material as brick or tiles by the building industry. Drilling cuttings from Rec?ncavo Region consists mainly of a clayey soil mixed with n-parafin, chlorine and barite. They present and high percentage of clay fraction, in which ilite and kaolinite are the main clay minerals, and a high plasticity. The soils considered herein present different clay fractions, mineralogy, and chemical constituents. Their Atterberg limits vary widely. In this study, three different mixes of each soil were employed in order to assess the optimum mixture, e.g. 10%, 20% and 30%. The materials considered as raw material for bricks, are extruded, dried and then fired up to 7000C. The resulting brick is submitted to strength and TCLP tests. The experimental results have shown so far that a mixture of drilling cuttings with Pederva could be used as brick material Results from TCLP tests have indicated that these mixtures could be considered under Brazilian Standards as non hazardous but non inert materials.
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