Advances in enhanced oil recovery technologies for low permeability reservoirs

Low permeability oil and gas resources are rich and have great potential all over the world, which has gradually become the main goal of oil and gas development. However, after traditional primary and secondary exploitation, there is still a large amount of remaining oil that has not been recovered. Therefore, in recent years, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies for low permeability reservoirs have been greatly developed to further improve crude oil production. This study presents a comprehensive review of EOR technologies in low permeability reservoirs with an emphasis on gas flooding, surfactant flooding, nanofluid flooding and imbibition EOR technologies. In addition, two kinds of gel systems are introduced for conformance control in low permeability reservoirs with channeling problems. Finally, the technical challenges, directions and outlooks of EOR in low permeability reservoirs are addressed.(c) 2022 The Authors. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ 4.0/).

Automated summary

Low permeability oil and gas resources have great potential worldwide and have become the main focus of oil and gas development. Enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies have been developed to further improve crude oil production in low permeability reservoirs. This study provides a comprehensive review of EOR technologies and discusses the technical challenges, directions, and outlooks of EOR in low permeability reservoirs.