Lignin black liquor in chemical enhanced oil recovery: a review for sacrificial agent

Abstract

Enhance oil recovery (EOR) technique has been long used in residual oil recovery. Chemical EOR is emerging as a vital technology to recover additional residual oil through several mechanisms. The selection of high performance chemical for EOR is a challenging and time consuming task. Chemical EOR has been under spotlight for decades with enormous research efforts for specific reservoir applications. The research efforts reached its pinnacle with the development of surfactant families and formulation rules as well as the use of lignin from black liquor waste as surfactant or sacrificial agent. This complex chain of hydrocarbon and heavy molecular weight lignin, attribute to its high performance as surfactant. Moreover, lignin is a natural product; thus makes it as a low cost chemical. This review paper emphasizes on the importance of lignin in chemical EOR. The current trends and issues on its utilisation and its importance as an environmental sustainable biodegradable polymer matrix are discussed thoroughly. It is hope that this study will increase the research-based culture in lignin-based polymer composites; thus lead to generation of new ideas in the domain.