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UNCONVENTIONAL OIL. Latest granted patents 2014-2016. Gas injection or water flooding
Summary
Secondary recovery methods to increase reservoir pressure, such as water flooding and gas injection, are the oldest, most thoroughly studied and popular technologies for increased oil or gas recovery. Despite the existing experience, efficient implementation of these techniques requires individual consideration of the particularities of each well and the condition of the reservoirs. In addition, special attention should be paid to the choice of fluids and their injection and filtration modes, especially if intended for secondary use. Furthermore, the process requires modern servicing and use of state-of-art equipment. Not using a diligent approach to water flooding and gas injection extraction design can lead to intense corrosion of equipment, scale formation, and a reduction of reservoir permeability. On the other hand, the use of modern equipment, such as membrane systems to remove oxygen from the fluid, can further reduce hydrogen sulphide emissions, whereas carbon dioxide injection into the reservoir is one of the current methods of commercial disposal. A large number of current engineering solutions in this area are aimed at improving the efficiency of enhanced production processes while maintaining an ecological balance. The proposed patent statistical bulletin presents recent patents related to water flooding and gas injection technologies giving an overview of the main statistical patenting indicators.
The proposed bulletin is dedicated to gas injection or water flooding technologies and includes patents published in 2014-2016. Research methodology is available on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The patent bulletin includes 435 patent documents. The patents were granted in 19 patent offices around the world. 182 applicants from 18 countries participated in the development of the inventions. 343 subgroups of the International Patent Classification were encountered in the patent documents.
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: Rospatent (RU), USPTO (US), CNIPA (CN), IP Australia (AU), CIPO (CA), JPO (JP).
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.
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: ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (USA), Tatneft (Russia), ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (USA), Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (USA), Tokyo Gas Co. Ltd (Japan), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (the Netherlands), CO2 Solutions Inc (Canada), Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Arabia), Shell Oil Company (USA), and Wintershall Holding GmbH (Germany).
The bulletin contains lists of the top 10 prominent documents having the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, the shortest patent pending time.
A list 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 are provided in the conclusive part of the bulletin.
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 the development of unconventional oil production technologies.
