A conventional waterflood often leads to unsuccessful recovery of oil, as most of the injected water tends to channel into the more permeable zones. Pickering emulsions stabilized using surfactant and colloidal particles, such as nanoparticles, are gaining wider recognition in the petroleum industry due to their better thermal stability and stabilized flow behavior. In this work, a novel formulation of oil-in-water (o/w) emulsion stabilized using nanoparticle–surfactant–polymer in the presence of salt (NaCl) is investigated for improved oil recovery at conditions of high pressure (13.6 MPa) and high temperature (313–363 K). We report a comparative study of performance of o/w emulsion flooding with conventional water flooding for enhanced oil recovery of a crude oil having a viscosity of 161 mPa s at 313 K in a Berea sandstone core using core-flood experiments. The results of core flooding tests show that an incremental oil recovery of more than 23% of original oil in place over water flooding can be obtained using an emulsion flooding formulated in this work. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.