Baryte
Barium sulfate — astonishingly heavy for a pale, non-metallic mineral, and the weight in the drilling mud of every oil well.
Baryte is barium sulfate, and the first thing anybody notices is the weight. It is pale, glassy and unremarkable to look at, and about four and a half times as dense as water — heavier than many minerals that look metallic. The old name, heavy spar, is a straightforward description.
That density is the whole industry. The overwhelming majority of baryte mined is ground and suspended in drilling mud, where its weight holds back the pressure of the formation being drilled. Without a dense mud a well blows out, and baryte is the cheapest dense, chemically inert, non-abrasive solid available.
Uses
Drilling mud takes most of it. The rest goes to barium chemicals, to filler in paint and rubber, and to radiation shielding, where heavy aggregate in concrete does the work lead would otherwise do.
Its medical use turns on solubility. Barium ions are toxic, but barium sulfate is so insoluble that a patient can drink it: it passes through unabsorbed while being opaque to X-rays, which outlines the gut on a radiograph. The distinction between the element and this particular compound of it is, in that context, the difference between a diagnostic and a poison.
How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.
How this connects
Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.
is an ore of
- Barium — element · the principal source of barium Wikidata
is used as
- Medical imaging — application · the barium meal: insoluble enough to drink, opaque enough to outline the gut
is a component of
- Shale — rock · as bedded barite, precipitated on the sea floor rather than deposited from a vein — a distinct and commercially important mode of occurrence
- Epithermal vein — deposit type · the other common gangue, and the reason vein deposits supply a share of the world's drilling-mud barite
is an alternative to
- Hematite — mineral · as a drilling mud weighting agent, where the only property that matters is density per unit cost. Hematite is denser and more abrasive on pump parts, and baryte holds the market for that reason
Sources
- Material WorldOur own writing
- Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
- COD Advisory Board / Vilnius University · CC0 — contributors place data in the public domain