Archive
BIOENERGY. Latest granted patents 2016-2018. Landfill Gas
Summary
Currently, more than 30% of the world's municipal solid waste is collected in open landfills, representing a powerful source of greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane. In many large cities around the world more than 10 million tons of municipal waste are produced annually. The transformation of this resource into a fully-fledged energy product is one of the most important tasks of modern development. Technologies for utilization of landfill methane emitted as a result of controlled decomposition of bio-organic waste represent one of the best solutions to this problem. The United States occupies a leading position in this industry, and, for example, one of the largest LFG-to-electricity facilities - Puente Hills has a capacity of more than 50 MW and is able to provide electricity to about 50,000 households. However, despite the simplicity and availability of the technology, it has not yet received large-scale distribution, for reasons related to land allocation, long payback period of projects, safety requirements and environmental standards. This patent bulletin provides a systematic overview of the latest technical solutions in this area, which will provide the necessary statistics and lists of patent documents.
A selection of patent applications related landfill gas and published by patent offices around the globe in 2016-2018 is provided for review in the present bulletin. General research methodology can be found at Advanced Energy Technologies website. The present bulletin includes 227 patents, prepared by applicants from 21 countries and registered in 21 patent offices. The patent documents mention 177 applicants and 395 IPC subgroups.
Key Highlights
The bulletin contains statistical data on the 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 top three patent offices that registered the largest number of patents were USPTO (US), CNIPA (CN) and EPO.
For each of the patent documents selected for the examination in the present bulletin the characteristics of unified indicators were preliminary defined, they include: technical problems, types of inventive solutions employed, belonging to one or other technological segment. This allows the internal content for each of the indicators in the aggregate array of documents to be visualized, for instance, to define the sequence and proportional correlation of technical problems the inventive solutions disclosed in the texts aim to solve. A list of the top 10 groups consisting of patent documents with identical unified indicators contains ID numbers and applicant names of respective documents; the groups are sorted by the number of patent documents.
A list of the top 10 applicants by the number of patent documents includes New Technology Ventures, Inc (US), Osaka Gas Corporation (JP), Evonik Fibres Gmbh (AT), Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), UOP LLC (US), SGS North America Inc (US), Ecolab (US), General Electric (US), IlNG BV (NL), Johnson Matthey Plc (GB). Data representing the share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of applications by problems, IPC sections, patent offices is provided in the form of tables and diagrams for them.
The prominent documents pages contain the top 10 patent applications with the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, and the shortest patent pending time.
The conclusive part of the bulletin represents the lists of all of the documents reviewed, arranged by the top 10 groups of patent documents with identical unified indicators and by patent offices with the indication of the ID numbers of the registered patent applications.
Who needs this bulletin?
The statistics bulletin under examination serves as one of the variants to monitor advanced technical achievements in the specified industrial sector. The statistical data, rating evaluations and carefully selected patent documents provided in the bulletin can be of interest for inventors, students and educators, engineers, as well as for businessmen and investors, who in one way or another are concerned with the problems of the development of landfill gas technologies.
