Stabilization of crude oil asphaltenes in apolar alkane solvents was investigated using a series of alkylbenzene-derived amphiphiles as the asphaltene stabilizers. In this paper (i.e., part 1), we present the study on the influences of the chemical structure of these amphiphiles on the effectiveness of asphaltene solubilization and on the strength of asphaltene-amphiphile interaction using both UV/vis and FTIR spectroscopies. The results showed that the amphiphile’s effectiveness of asphaltene stabilization was primarily controlled by the polarity of the amphiphile’s head group and the length of the amphiphile’s alkyl tail. Increasing the acidity of the amphiphile’s head group could promote the amphiphile’s ability to stabilize asphaltenes by increasing the acid-base attraction between asphaltenes and amphiphiles. On the other hand, although decreasing the amphiphile’s tail length increased the asphaltene-amphiphile attraction slightly, it still required a minimum tail length (six carbons for p-alkylphenol amphiphiles) for amphiphiles to form stable steric layers around asphaltenes. We also found additional acidic side groups of amphiphiles could further improve the amphiphile’s ability to stabilize asphaltenes. The effect of the molecular weight of alkane solvents on the amphiphile’s ability to stabilize asphaltenes was also studied. The successive decline of the effectiveness of p-alkylphenol amphiphiles on asphaltene stabilization from dodecane to pentane could be explained in art by the reduction of the asphaltene-amphiphile attractive interaction. On the contrary, the extremely strong ability of p-alkylbenzenesulfonic acid amphiphiles to associate both asphaltenes and themselves made their effectiveness on asphaltene stabilization decrease with increasing molecular weight of alkanes.