The surging demand for unconventional oil has driven the research initiative to extract heavy metals from heavy crude oil to ease the upgrading processes and produce lighter-ends hydrocarbon to be supplied in the field of transportation and petrochemical industry. Despite multiple methods have been discovered for metal removal, the low efficiency removal had enlightened the need of using ionic liquids. Three ionic liquids are studied in this project which are 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium octylsulfate (BMIMOS), 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium octylsulfate (EMIMOS) and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide (EMIMNTf2) on extraction of two complex heavy metals; nickel etioporphyrin and vanadium oxide etioporphyrin. The experiments were tested at temperature ranging from 30 °C to 90 °C and 30 minutes to 90 minutes of mixing time. In addition, samples were analysed through UV-Visible Spectroscopy (UV-Vis) and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) to determine the effectiveness of the extraction and study the functional group presence in the samples accordingly. Results revealed the overall maximum extraction efficiency of 22 of Ni-EP was recorded by EMIMNTf2. The changing in reaction temperature and time did not affect the percentage of Ni-EP removal by EMIMNTf2 © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)