Slight insights and perspectives of future heavy oil recovery

In this paper, we put forward critical future prospects based on the paper that was published on International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. At present, engineers are familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of different working fluids in thermal recovery of heavy oil. For all the oil displacement mechanism, they can be summarized into only three aspects: (a) physical heat conduction, (b) chemical reactions, and (c) the differences in hydrodynamic properties between fluids. This is already well known in the existing body of knowledge. However, how much will each of these three mechanisms contribute to the total oil recovery efficiency is quite interesting and important to the industry. Based on the commented paper and some related references, we pointed out the future research directions in this area.