Abstract
As conventional oil recovery techniques have numerous deficiencies in oil recovery rate (up to 40% OOIP), process safety, financial aspects, sustainability and environmental impacts other efficient techniques like MEOR had been invented that utilize microbes or their metabolites like biosurfactants to enhance oil recovery process from depleted reservoirs and increase the recovery rate up to 50% of remained oil in the reservoirs. Biosurfactants are the interesting chemicals that encompass a large group of compounds with unique properties to play crucial role in improving oil recovery. Among biosurfactants, lichenysin produced by B. lichenoformis or B. mojavensis Jf-2 and it has several different variants based on the producing strains. It is an alternative candidate with amazing features like stability in extremely high temperature up to 140 °C, saving its optimal activity in a wide range of pH values from 6 up to 10 pH, high salinity up to 10% NaCl concentration, and a significant CMC from 10 to 20 mg/L that is the lowest CMC among studied biosurfactants suitable for MEOR. All these characteristics indicate its signifance as a biosurfactant that has the capability to revolutionize the MEOR technique in the future.