A mini-investigation on enhanced oil recovery evolution (2007 – 2020)

Abstract

Energy plays an important role in sustaining humanity. With rising worldwide energy demand and the great dependence of energy generation on fossil fuels, it is inevitable that enhanced oil recovery must be deployed to recover more possible reserves. This report focuses on reviewing publications related to enhanced oil recovery from 2007 to 2020 through the utilization of bibliometric analysis. Of the 5498 documents retrieved from Web of Science, 569 journals, 90 countries, 2025 organizations, and 8684 authors are involved. China, the United States, Iran, Canada, and India published the most documents. The United States has the highest h-index at 61. The analysis of keywords had shown that the hot issues lie around four main domains namely carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS), microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR), development of unconventional reserves, and chemical enhanced oil recovery. This study provides some useful insights for future research directions. From there, discussions were subsequently placed on chemical EOR.