Review of the use of biosurfactants for their implementation in enhanced oil recovery processes

Abstract

Improving the performance of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) processes is of vital importance in the oil industry, because the number of mature fields will continue to grow and each year more fields will exceed their production peak. Emerging chemical recovery technologies are an efficient option to reduce the amount of oil remaining originally on site after conventional extraction techniques are carried out. However, the chemical substances used, in addition to being very expensive, are of synthetic origin, which means that they are not biodegradable.  

For this reason, the oil industry recognizes the need to implement new environmentally friendly techniques that allow increasing oil recovery in mature fields due to the difficulty of finding new deposits. Therefore, this article reviews the implementation of biosurfactants in enhanced oil recovery processes as a new alternative for chemical recovery processes.

The interest in creating and implementing compounds that are biodegradable, non-toxic and also efficient has increased in all sectors of the industry in recent years, and in the case of surfactants it is not the exception, since they have shown to have great potential for application. 

Biosurfactants, unlike their synthetic counterparts, are produced from renewable resources using vegetable raw materials or through fermentation processes with different types of microorganisms, additionally they are biodegradable, have a lower environmental toxicity, a high capacity to reduce interfacial tension (IFT) at low concentrations and show good activity in a wide range of temperature.