Archive
UNCONVENTIONAL OIL. Latest granted patents 2016-2018. Treatment and Refinement
Summary
Unconventional oil production is increasingly taking an important position in the balance of petroleum-producing companies, which is primarily related to the depletion of conventional oil deposits. However, highly-viscous, heavy, highly-sulphurous and other kinds of unconventional oil require a full-scale reorganization of production involving the most advanced technologies. To a great extent this relates to the finishing treatment phases of the extracted petroleum-containing liquid, including the separation of water, associated gas, metals and other harmful impurities. The content of undesired components in the unconventional oil is generally much higher than in conventional oil, and considering the additional intensive treatment of the formation with chemical agents, steam, water, polymers, etc. their concentration can grow massively. Due to this, the procedures of special treatment and refinement of unconventional oil become particularly important. The present patent statistical bulletin includes a selection of recent patents on this subject, which can be of practical interest as a systematized source of promising engineering solutions.
The present bulletin reviews patents granted by patent offices around the globe in 2016-2018 in the field related to treatment and refinement in unconventional oil. General research methodology can be found on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. 787 patent documents from 22 patent offices around the world are represented in the bulletin. In total, 367 applicants from 25 countries and 1046 subgroups of the International Patent Classification are mentioned.
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), CIPO (CA) and CNIPA (CN).
From the analysis of texts of patent documents presented in this bulletin, detailed information is extracted for each of the unified indicators, which include: technical problems, types of inventive solutions employed, belonging of a patent document to one or other technological segment. The results of the statistical processing of this data for the entire array of the patent documents examined are summarized in the correspondingly-named diagrams and tables. In addition to that, a list of the top 10 groups of patent documents with identical unified indicators is provided, where the groups are sorted by the number of patent documents and include ID numbers and applicant names of the documents.
A list of the top 10 applicants by the number of patent documents includes: Saudi Arabian Oil Company (SA), Xyleco Inc (US), ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (US), Cidra Corporate Services Inc (US), Ecolab (US), Syncrude Canada Limited (CA), Green Source Energy LLC (US), Axens (FR), Total Raffinage Marketing (FR), Suncor Energy (CA). Data representing the share in the established intellectual property market, distribution of documents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices and technology indicators is provided in the form of tables and diagrams for them.
The bulletin contains lists of the top prominent documents having the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, the shortest patent pending time.
The patent bulletin also includes a list of all of the documents reviewed, arranged by patent offices and indicated by 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 treatment and refinement methods in unconventional oil production.
