US Patent Issued to Saudi Arabian Oil on Oct. 7 for "Identifying drill cuttings with tracer pills" (Russian, Saudi Arabia Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,435,622, issued on Oct. 7, was assigned to Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia).

"Identifying drill cuttings with tracer pills" was invented by Vera Solovyeva (Moscow), Vladimir Khmelnitskiy (Moscow), Vyacheslav Grokhovsky (Moscow) and Nouf AlJabri (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques for identifying drill cuttings include drilling a wellbore; during the drilling, circulating a drilling fluid that includes a plurality of tracer pills, where each tracer pill includes a shell or coating formed of a thermoresponsive material and a tracer material enclosed within the shell; during the drilling, removing cu...