Archive
BIOENERGY. Latest granted patents 2014-2016. Biomass-to-liquids (Fischer-Tropsch)
Summary
The production of biofuels by means of the BTL process is a fairly well-established technology to convert bulk plant materials into useful fuels. It also holds great promise for the future as synthetic fuels are more environmentally-friendly with regards to their lower concentrations of nitrogen, sulphur and aromatics. The countries with the highest production rates are France, Finland, Canada, the United States and Sweden. Some of the major facilities include Enerkem Edmonton in Canada, BioTfuel Dunkirk Pilot in France, Choren Freiberg in Germany, and Fortum Joensuu Demo in Finland. Despite the overall efficiency of these processes, there remain several problems concerning the productivity of the main processes and operational costs, which the technical solutions presented in the patents try to address.
A selection of patents related to the BTL process and published by patent offices around the globe in 2014-2016 is provided for review in the present bulletin. General research methodology can be found at the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The present bulletin includes 175 patents, prepared by applicants from 20 countries and registered in 19 patent offices. The patent documents mention 187 applicants and 283 IPC subgroups.
Key Highlights
The bulletin provides general statistical figures, including the overall distribution of patent documents by years, by patent offices and by applicant countries, applicant-related data (residents and non-residents), data on the most frequently mentioned International Patent Classification divisions (sections, classes, subclasses, groups, and subgroups). The most popular patent offices among the applicants were: USPTO (US), CNIPA (CN), IP Australia (AU), EPO, CIPO (CA), JPO (JP).
From the analysis of texts of patents presented in this bulletin, detailed information is extracted for each of the unified indicators, which include: technical problems, types of inventive solutions employed, belonging of a patent document to one or other technological segment. The results of the statistical processing of this data for the entire array of the patents examined are summarized in the correspondingly-named diagrams and tables. In addition to that, a list of the top 10 groups of patent documents with identical unified indicators is provided, where the groups are sorted by the number of patent documents and include ID numbers and applicant names of the documents.
The following information can be found for the top 10 applicants: breakdown of patents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices, (technological indicators), as well as the estimation of their share in the established intellectual property market. The 10 leading applicants by the number of patent documents were: Sasol Technology (Pty) Ltd. (ZA), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (NL), RES USA LLC (US), Shell Oil Company (US), UPM-Kymmene Oyj (FI), RV LIZENZ AG (CH), Taylor David W (US), ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions AG (DE), University of the Witwatersrand (ZA), Wright Harold A (US).
The top prominent documents section includes three lists of the top 10 patents having the highest bibliographical rating, the largest number of IPC sections, and the shortest patent pending time.
The patent bulletin also includes a list of all of the documents reviewed, arranged by patent offices and indicated by the ID numbers of the granted patents.
Who needs this bulletin?
The proposed patent statistics bulletin allows the existing trends in the intellectual property market of the specified industrial sector to be timely traced, as well as the possibility of acquiring a carefully selected list of patent documents fully corresponding to the specified subject. The bulletin can be useful for inventors, engineers, scientific workers, and business representatives, who are focused on BTL production technologies.
