Advanced Research and Techniques on Enhanced Oil Recovery Processes

Dear Colleagues,

It is evident that the energy industry has come into the spotlight and greatly influenced the world economy over the past century. As energy demand is projected to increase significantly in the coming years and sustainable practices gain traction across the globe, there has been considerable interest toward renewables to meet this demand. Nevertheless, the role of hydrocarbons in the development of industries, and in particular, the heavy and petrochemical industries along with the economy, will still remain critical. Furthermore, it is reported that many of the conventional reserves are reaching potential maturity, and discoveries with respect to new major reserves have not been increasing comparatively. In other words, the rate of replacement of the produced reserves by new discoveries has been declining steadily over the past few years, while exploitation of unconventional resources has gained momentum in recent years. As a result, there is an increased necessity for cost-effective and sustainable approaches to recover hydrocarbons from the current limited conventional reserves, particularly through enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

Over a decade, there have been continuous R&D activities executed to improve EOR processes and techniques applicable to mature oil reserves. Although EOR processes have significant potential to increment oil recovery, the selection of an optimal strategy for field application is extremely challenging. Understanding the priceless opportunities and key innovations in these fundamental techniques would greatly support the decision-making process for such applications. This includes analyzing operational, technical, economic, and environmental aspects of the challenges to identify tailored strategies that may be case specific.

This Special Issue aims to collate experimental/numerical/field scale investigations with novel solutions and review papers with state-of-the-art findings that can deliver a significant contribution to the EOR community. Even though the Special Issue is open to all contributions related to EOR, potential focus areas are summarized as the following:

• Technical challenges
• Operational challenges
• Environmental impacts/benefits
• Economic factors
• High viscosity crude
• Low salinity/smart water flooding
• Carbon capture and utilization
• EOR and reservoir characterization
• High salinities and high temperatures
• Extreme reservoir heterogeneity with fractures
• Tight rocks and unconventionals
• Offshore/deep water
• Injectivity/profile control
• Modeling and simulation
• Chemical EOR and usage of advanced materials
• Hybrid and novel methods for enhanced heavy oil recovery

Dr. Md Motiur Rahman
Dr. Mohamed R. Haroun
Prof. Dr. Abdulrazag Zekri
Guest Editors

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