Promising Biotechnology on Selective Plugging and Wettability Alteration for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

Though renewable energy resources are growing in the market recently, crude oil is still used as a major resource [1]. Such trends motivate efforts to find environment-friendly alternative methods to enhance oil recovery. To meet the rising demand of these alternatives, microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) has shown potential [2,3]. MEOR has similar mechanisms with chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) as it applies biologicallyproduced surfactant or polymer to improve oil recovery. The main advantages of MEOR compared to CEOR are that these bio products are generally not only biodegradable but cheap. Earlier studies have shown that MEOR is sufficient to be a tertiary enhanced oil recovery tool with these advantages [4]. There are two major areas of research that have been most actively studied such as selective plugging and wettability alteration. These two major mechanisms will be briefly investigated through this review.