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UNCONVENTIONAL OIL. Latest published applications 2015-2017. Oil sands
Summary
Oil sands form a naturally occurring mixture of sand, water, clay, minerals and bitumen. Bitumen is a black and highly viscous liquid or semi-solid form of petroleum. Oil sands deposits can be found around the world. Some of the most important oil sands deposits are located in Canada, Venezuela, the United States and Russia. Oil sands can be extracted using two methods, depending on how deep the deposits are below the surface: in-situ production or open-pit mining. In-situ extraction methods are used to recover bitumen that lies too deep for surface mining to be efficient, which is often the case. Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) is currently the most widely used in-situ recovery method. It requires the drilling of a top and a bottom well; steam is then injected continuously into the top well so that the bitumen becomes more fluid and flows to the lower well. The bitumen is then pumped to the surface. SAGD involves several technical problems concerning low initial oil rate, artificial lifting of heavy oil to the surface, horizontal well operation, or the deploying of the process in reservoirs with low permeability, etc. Another problematic issue surrounding oil sands production is environmental pollution due to tailings ponds, as they contain contaminants and unrecovered hydrocarbons. The patent applications presented in this bulletin try to resolve some of the aforementioned issues.
A selection of patent applications related to oil sands production and published by patent offices around the globe in 2015-2017 is provided for review in the present bulletin. General research methodology can be found on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The present bulletin includes 2937 patent applications, prepared by applicants from 36 countries and registered in 37 patent offices. The patent documents mention 662 applicants and 1886 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 registered the largest number of patent applications were USPTO (US), CIPO (CA) and WIPO.
From the analysis of texts of applications 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 applications 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.
The following information can be found for the top 10 applicants: breakdown of applications 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: Ecolab (US), Dow Global Technologies, LLC (US), Xyleco Inc. (US), Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US), ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (US), Siemens AG (DE), Saudi Arabian Oil Company (SA), Suncor Energy (CA), Harris Corporation (US), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (NL).
The top prominent documents section includes three lists of the top 10 patent applications having the highest bibliographical rating, the largest number of IPC sections, and those not being a part of patent family.
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 registered patent applications is 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 oil sands production technologies.
