Archive
OIL&GAS FROM LOW PERMEABILITY PLAYS. Latest granted patents 2016-2018. Energy, gas or water consumption
Summary
The process of extracting oil and gas from reservoirs with low permeability is very costly in terms of material resources, primarily water, as well as electricity and various types of fossil fuels. When drilling wells, a significant part of the direct material and energy costs are steel tubes and diesel fuel consumption, and portland cement. Well fracturing operations, among other things, require a large flow of water, reaching several thousand cubic meters per well. Gas processing carried out directly at the field is also a very energy-intensive operation, especially with regard to thermal energy. In addition, environmental regulations do not allow flaring and venting of natural gas, which entails additional energy consumption for its utilization. All the noted positions directly affect the economic indicators of shale hydrocarbon production and are therefore the subject of intensive research and inventive activity. The proposed statistical bulletin accumulates the latest patents related to the consumption of the main material and energy resources in fracking and related operations, and also presents a brief statistical analysis.
The present bulletin includes and examines patents granted by patent offices around the globe in 2016-2018 in the field related to the energy, gas or water consumption in the process of oil or gas extraction from low permeability plays.
A selection of patents related to environment and ecology issues of oil and gas extraction technologies from low permeability plays 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 378 patents, prepared by applicants from 12 countries and registered in 14 patent offices. The patent documents mention 161 applicants and 424 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 granted the largest number of patents were USPTO (US), CNIPA (CN) and CIPO (CA).
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 Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (USA), Baker Hughes Incorporated (USA), Evolution Well Services, LLC (USA), Foret Plasma Labs, LLC (USA), Flowpro Well Technology, A.S. (Norway), CNPC CCDC Chuanqing Drilling Engineering Company Limited (China), Ecolab (USA), SiGNa Chemistry, Inc. (USA), Aquasource Technologies Corporation (USA), Orbital Atk, Inc (USA). Data representing the share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of patent 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 patents 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 granted patents.
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 the directional drilling and fracking technologies.
