Trends and Prospects of Physicochemical Methods for Enhanced Oil Recovery of Heavy Oil Fields

The main challenge of the exploitation of fields with hard to recover reserves including high-viscosity oil pools is a low oil recovery factor (ORF) in the development by the main impact, i.e. displacement agent and heat-carrier injection. The review considers trends and prospects of physicochemical methods for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) of high viscosity heavy oil fields developed in the natural mode and combined with thermal techniques. The main sources of the relevant information are proceedings of world congresses and annual international conferences for heavy oil recovery issues in countries with significant geological reserves of heavy oil and bitumen. The development and use of physicochemical EOR methods for that are grounded on nanoheterogeneous chemically evolving surfactant-based systems, both as cold technologies and combined with thermal steam stimulation (TSS), appear to be promising as one of the possible solutions to this problem. The perspective of the concept of chemically evolving oil-displacing systems is proven by field test results of EOR technologies developed at the Institute of Petroleum Chemistry of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Tomsk.