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OIL&GAS FROM LOW PERMEABILITY PLAYS. Latest granted patents 2016-2018. Auxiliary means for fracturing
Summary
Hydraulic fracturing is a well stimulation technique involving fracturing rock formations by a pressurized liquid. Fracking needs lots of associated equipment such as gauges for flow rate and fluid density, as well as storage tanks. Also, equipment, for example: for the production of biocide, myocide and bactericide; for well cleaning from processing fluids; for silica dust removal during proppant transportation on the site; for the removal of solids from fluid streams; and for the preparation of chemicals to avoid early settling of resins, used for combining proppants, on the surface of equipment and well pad is employed. Lately, operators have also been experimenting with new fracking techniques and materials to enhance performance, for example: super-critical CO2, a technique which is still at the concept stage; liquid nitrogen, whose applicability seems to be limited, although the technique is commercially available and has been applied for fracturing shale formations; or cryogenically processed natural gas extracted from nearby wells or from the hydrocarbon formation itself. Also, with the increasing demands and rising cost of fresh water, there is a trend to use produced water in stimulation operations, which, however, regularly contains high levels of TDS (total dissolved solids), such as minerals, salts and metals, and is usually very hard. This can lower performance or make operations fail completely. Thus, produced water is often treated to obtain a water quality suitable for a fracturing fluid, even if it is sometimes cost-prohibitive to recycle water with high TDS content. At the same time, it can also be expensive to dispose of it underground or transport it to a disposal facility. Therefore, operators have recently designed fluid systems that can be formulated directly with salty produced water, such as zirconium-crosslinked CMHPG fluids, which are able to deal with high levels of TDS reaching 300k mg/L or more, or borate-crosslinked guar fluids. The patents presented in this bulletin are a good example of how operators and scientists are striving to make hydraulic fracturing safer and more environmentally-friendly.
The proposed bulletin is dedicated to auxiliary means for fracking and includes patents published in 2016-2018. Research methodology is available on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The patent bulletin includes 1089 patent documents. The patents were granted in 16 patent offices around the world. 201 applicants from 21 countries participated in the development of the inventions. 1166 subgroups of the International Patent Classification were encountered in the patent documents.
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 granted the largest number of patents were USPTO (US), IP Australia (AU) and CNIPA (CN).
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.
Data is provided for each of the top 10 applicants, leading in terms of the number of published patent documents among the ones examined in the bulletin, illustrating their share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of patents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices. Representatives of the United States prevail among the patenting leaders in the examined period of time, including: Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US), Dow Global Technologies, LLC (US), Rohm and Haas Company (US), Baker Hughes Incorporated (US), Unilever N.V. (NL), Oren Technologies, LLC (US), Ecolab (US), Schlumberger Technology B.V. (NL), Akzo Nobel Chemicals International B.V. (NL), Sinopec China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (CN).
The bulletin contains lists of the top 10 prominent patents having the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, 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 granted patents.
Who needs this bulletin?
The data provided in the proposed bulletin is a timely reflection of the transformations that take place in the intellectual property sector of the industrial direction concerned. A thoroughly edited selection of patent documents can become a good complement to your library of available technical solutions. The bulletin is targeted at inventors, engineers, researchers, managers and business administrators involved in the development of directional drilling technologies and hydraulic fracturing.
