Polymers which are used as fluid loss control agents are commonly organic and are used in both circulating as well as non-circulating phases of drilling operations. Drilling costs associated with these types of agents are very high contributing to 5 – 15% of total drilling costs and hence it is very important to find a substitute for these additives that can be used for same purpose but at lower drilling cost and at better efficiency. It is very important to have in depth knowledge of all the properties of drilling fluid in order to design an effective mud. This is because drilling mud can have great variations in different properties such as rheology, fluid loss, density, viscosity, pH etc. Various effective additives can be used to change properties of mud as required. In the light of the above fact, new additives have been introduced and the purpose of this research is to test these new additives used in drilling fluid as well as to understand the effect of these additives on the properties of the drilling fluid such as filtration rate, filter cake thickness, PH, viscosity and density to improve drilling performance. The new additives used in our experiment are rice husk ash, hay barn and hay barn ash. Rice husk and hay barn is seen as an agro waste in some of the countries like India, Nigeria and Thailand. This is because they lack technical knowledge on the potential and valuable use of such waste products. Such waste products can be utilized to a greater extent in petroleum industry to minimize costs as they are easily available at cheaper prices. Initially, an experiment is conducted to understand the rheological properties of these additives before adding them to mud. Later, different percentage of these additives are added into the plain mud at different temperatures and pressures and various tests are performed based on API standards (Akon, 2014)

Keywords: Rice Husk, Rice ash and Hay Barn