Although new energy has been widely used in our lives, oil is still one of the main energy sources in the world. After the application of traditional oil recovery methods, there are still a large number of oil layers that have not been exploited, and there is still a need to further increase oil recovery to meet the urgent need for oil in the world economic development. Chemically enhanced oil recovery (CEOR) is considered to be a kind of effective enhanced oil recovery technology, which has achieved good results in the field, but these technologies cannot simultaneously effectively improve oil sweep efficiency, oil washing efficiency, good injectability, and reservoir environment adaptability. Viscoelastic surfactants (VES) have unique micelle structure and aggregation behavior, high efficiency in reducing the interfacial tension of oil and water, and the most important and unique viscoelasticity, etc., which has attracted the attention of academics and field experts and introduced into the technical research of enhanced oil recovery. In this paper, the mechanism and research status of viscoelastic surfactant flooding are discussed in detail and focused, and the results of viscoelastic surfactant flooding experiments under different conditions are summarized. Finally, the problems to be solved by viscoelastic surfactant flooding are introduced, and the countermeasures to solve the problems are put forward. This overview presents extensive information about viscoelastic surfactant flooding used for EOR, and is intended to help researchers and professionals in this field understand the current situation.

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Tight oil reservoirs have poor physical properties, insufficient formation energy, and low natural productivity. CO 2 flooding is an important technical mean that enhances the oil recovery of dense reservoirs and achieves effective CO 2 sequestration, but strong heterogeneity of the tight oil reservoir usually results in gas channeling and poor enhanced oil recovery effect. The existing methods to prevent gas channeling are mainly to use the small-molecule amine system and the polymer gel system to plug fracture and high permeability channels. The smallmolecular amine system has low flash points and pollutes the environment and the polymer gel has poor injectivity and great damage to the formation, which limit their large-scale application. Therefore, a new viewpoint of CO 2 -low interfacial tension viscoelastic fluid synergistic flooding for enhanced oil recovery in a tight oil reservoir was made. The performance of low interfacial tension viscoelastic fluid (GOBT) was studied. The injectivity and oil displacement effect of CO 2 -GOBT synergistic flooding were evaluated, and the mechanism of CO 2 -GOBT synergistic flooding was discussed. The experimental results showed that 0.4% GOBT is a low interfacial tension viscoelastic fluid, which has strong adaptability to the salinity water of tight oil reservoirs (6788−80,000 mg/L), good viscosity stability at different pHs, excellent capacity to emulsify crude oil, and the ability to improve reservoir water wettability. CO 2 alternating 0.4% GOBT flooding has good injection ability in cores (K a = 0.249 mD), and injecting 0.4% GOBT can effectively increase the injection pressure of subsequent CO 2 flooding. CO 2 alternating 0.4% GOBT flooding can effectively improve water flooding recovery in tight sandstone reservoirs, which is better than CO 2 flooding and 0.4% GOBT flooding in both homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions. The mechanisms of CO 2 alternating 0.4% GOBT flooding to enhance the oil recovery include that GOBT and CO 2 foam block high permeability layers, shunt and sweep low permeability layers, and GOBT emulsify and wash oil. CO 2 partially dissolving in GOBT synergistically enhances the core water wettability, which improves GOBT injectability, emulsification, and stripping ability to residual oil.