Archive
UNCONVENTIONAL OIL. Latest granted patents 2016-2018. Oil Sands
Summary
Enormous reserves of bituminous oil and the existence of mastered commercial technologies for its extraction ensure considerable interest in this sector of the petroleum industry. An especially strong boost to the development was triggered by the emerging of Enhanced oil recovery technologies in general, and the SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage) method in particular. However, violent competition in global markets stimulate the producers who extract oil form this resource to constantly perfect the technologies of production, transportation and processing of bitumen and its derivatives. The present statistical bulletin provides the lists of recent patents related to major technological phases of bituminous oil production and its subsequent treatment before its processing in oil refineries. The bulletin also contains essential patent statistical information.
The proposed bulletin is dedicated to oil sands and includes patents published in 2016-2018. Research methodology is available on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The patent bulletin includes 1620 patent documents. The patents were granted in 23 patent offices around the world. 664 applicants from 29 countries participated in the development of the inventions. 1702 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: USPTO (US), CIPO (CA), IP Australia (AU), CNIPA (CN), Rospatent (RU), EPO, JPO (JP), EAPO, IMPI (MX), KIPO (KR).
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 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 applicants: breakdown of documents 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: Xyleco Inc. (US), ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (US), Harris Corporation (US), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (NL), Suncor Energy (CA), Saudi Arabian Oil Company (SA), Ecolab (US), Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US), Siemens AG (DE), Syncrude Canada Limited (CA).
The prominent documents pages contain the top 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 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 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.
