Archive
UNCONVENTIONAL OIL. Latest published applications 2015-2017. Gas injection or water flooding
Summary
Water flooding and gas injection are the most common techniques involved in secondary recovery operations from depleted or low-permeability reservoirs. The purpose of the secondary recovery is to increase the reservoir pressure and to obtain additional quantities of hydrocarbons after primary depletion. To optimize the reservoir sweep efficiency, water flooding and gas injection processes must be carefully designed and controlled at every point of the operation, considering the parameters and condition of each individual reservoir. In addition, more complex and combined methods have gained importance, among which are low-salinity waterflooding, miscible gas flooding, cyclic gas injection, and the miscible water-alternating-gas process. In order to increase production of viscous oil, the choice of the most suitable soluble gases to reduce the viscosity is important, among which are natural gas, associated petroleum gas or flue gas. The use of СO2 injection may have the greatest prospects, both in terms of increasing oil recovery, as well as the useful utilization of this greenhouse gas. The latest technological innovations in this area are best highlighted in the patent applications presented in this statistical bulletin.
The proposed bulletin is dedicated to gas injection or water flooding technologies in unconventional oil and includes patent applications published in 2015-2017. Research methodology is available on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The patent bulletin includes 1120 patent documents. The applications were registered in 25 patent offices around the world. 232 applicants from 17 countries participated in the development of the inventions. 748 subgroups of the International Patent Classification were encountered in the patent documents.
Key Highlights
Statistical information presented in the bulletin includes distribution of patent documents by years, by patent offices and by applicant countries, applicant-related data (residents and non-residents), and data on the most frequently mentioned International Patent Classification divisions (sections, classes, subclasses, groups, and subgroups). The largest number of applications during the period of time under revision was registered by the patent office of the United States.
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 documents by problems, IPC sections, patent offices and technology indicators. Representatives of the USA prevail among the patenting leaders in the examined period of time. These leaders include: ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (US), Baker Hughes Incorporated (US), ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (US), Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US), General Electric (US), Saudi Arabian Oil Company (SA), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (NL), China Petroleum & Chemical Company (CN), ConocoPhilips Company (US), Ecolab (US).
The prominent documents pages contain the top 10 patent applications with the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, and those not being a part of patent family.
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 registered patent applications.
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.
