Enhanced oil recovery using surfactants

Surfactant flooding as a chemical enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) method has received great interest since 1927. This interest covered different experimental and numerical aspects ranging from lab to field scales. In this review, it has strived to detail this promising CEOR approach, represent a holistic view of underlying issues (i.e., surfactant types, mechanisms, challenges, modeling, simulation, upscaling, screening criteria, and field cases), and finally how to address them (of course, economic-based issues are in part discussed where it is required). In this regard, the integration of these parts is a prerequisite. To achieve this target, a roadmap founded on intimate knowledge of authors is proposed and categorized in the following phases: laboratory, simulation, and pilot. In all sections, it is attempted to address different parts of the proposed roadmap in addition to its subsections. Furthermore, in this way, results and data analysis of different research items in the literature are used to give enough facts and figures at the mercy of the stated surfactant-related issues.