Millions of barrels of water-based muds are used each year to explore and exploit oil and gas resources both in the onshore and offshore drilling environments. Bentonite muds have been used as a drilling mud additive in the oil and gas, geothermal, and water well drilling industries for hole cleaning, cuttings suspension, formation support, and other drilling operations. Conventional chemical structure of bentonite muds is associated with serious technical limitations due to poor tolerance to monovalent and divalent salts, undesirable mud solids, cement contamination, pH changes, and temperature changes above 100 degrees Celsius. The standard mud system also has strong interactions with subsurface formations such as anhydrite, evaporite, salt diapirs, clay rich formations, reactive shale, marls, and the like. As salt cannot be used to inhibit the reactive fresh water phase of the bentonite mud, it creates serious borehole problems in drilling evaporite, anhydrite, and reactive shales that are frequently encountered in many fields. Due to the high dissolution capacity of fresh water used in bentonite mud formulations, hole enlargement and loss of circulation occur while drilling shales, evaporites, and anhydrites. The bentonite mud triggered bore hole problems can lead to the setup of an unplanned casing string with a significant increase in total well costs and may also lead to a poor cementation job requiring a remedial action for a correction. However, due to serious technical limitations of the bentonite muds, they are ineffective in drilling evaporite, anhydrite, clay rich, and salty formations in many fields.