DIRECTIONAL DRILLING & HYDRAULIC FRACTURING. Ecology & Environment. Patent Database. Aenert. January 2022
Introduction
The latest decisions taken on COP-26, including agreements on coal, methane, and limitations on the utilization of fossil fuels make up an important stage in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. However, it will take several decades, numerous organizational arrangements, and immense financial resources for a complete switching of the energy industry to renewable sources. This is related to the fact that presently the share of fossil fuels in primary energy consumption globally comprises more than 85%, and primary consumption of oil and gas constitutes the major portion of this volume – about 55%. Nevertheless, the problems of climate change require urgent and decisive steps to be taken. It is apparent that practical accomplishment of these objectives is impossible without a full-scale implementation of advanced technologies aimed at environmental protection and reduction of ecological burden on infrastructure. In the first instance, this is related to directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies that are increasingly being used in modern oil-and-gas extraction practices.
Typical ecological problems of fossil fuel production are also common in these technologies, for instance: groundwater contamination; soil pollution from spills of oil and chemicals; wastewater mismanagement or failures in drill cuttings recycling; air pollution by combustion products, hydrogen sulfide or methane; environmental degradation, including landscape changes, disruption to wildlife habitats, noise. Employment of directional drilling and, particularly, hydraulic fracturing imparts additional ecological risks. This is caused by an extended and more energy-intensive well drilling; consumption of a large amount of water and water bearing-layer depletion; absence of full-scale control of fracture formation in the hydraulic fracturing process, which can lead to the appearance of areas of contact with natural fissures and water-bearing layers; involvement of dangerous chemicals; and disturbance of seismic balance.
These problems challenge energy companies to conduct more thorough planning and field development, and to observe additional and raised requirements to equipment; they demand all-embracing and efficient control of compliance with regulations related to employed technologies and environmental monitoring. Naturally, these measures inevitably lead to additional costs and are met with resistance by producers, which is particularly topical in the conditions of economic slowdown and fuel consumption decrease caused by the spread of coronavirus disease. It is also apparent that revealing a reasonable trade-off between the interests of energy-producing companies, state control authorities, and environmental non-governmental organizations would form a foundation for a successful transition to ecologically clean energy.
Timely provision of producers with information concerning the state-of-the-art technical advancements, cutting-edge technologies, and highly-efficient compositions is of great importance for the successful employment of ecologically-neutral solutions in hydrocarbon production. A considerable portion of efficient technical solutions aimed to resolve or mitigate the adverse effects of the aforementioned problems is concentrated in patents or patent applications registered in various patent offices.
The patent database "DIRECTIONAL DRILLING & HYDRAULIC FRACTURING / Ecology & environment" includes the inventions, where the authors disclosed technical solutions that eliminate or reduce the negative environmental impacts related to the employment of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies in hydrocarbon production. The database contains 13214 patent documents registered in patent offices around the world since 1994 and 2752 patent families.
The database is also provided with a patent information bulletin that includes statistical analysis for major parameters of patent documents published during the 20-year period between 2001-2020. In particular, the bulletin includes a breakdown of documents by publication dates, patent families, patent offices, residents and non-residents, applicant countries, and major technological operations. It also includes some examples of patent solutions disclosed in particular inventions, analysis of patenting activity, and other data, which can be of interest for the engineering community.
The texts of core patent documents shown in the proposed database can be found in generally-accessible patent search systems, such as Google Patents, Lens, Espacenet.
The reuse of patent database and patent information bulletin is authorised under the Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International — CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
Methodology
The database was formed in two phases. The first phase included a preliminary collection of patent documents from generally-accessible sources by using conventional methods involving key-words, patent classification indices, applicant and inventor data. During the second phase, to improve the correspondence of inventions to the chosen criteria, the text of all core documents from those, preliminary collected in the first phase were subjected to a thorough subject- and semantic-oriented assessment by experienced engineering personnel. Also, each document in the final version of the database was marked with additional topical indices allowing an in-depth systematization of the inventions.
Opting for such a labour-intensive way to produce a patent database was caused by the fact that subject-oriented search and systematization of inventions are associated with substantial difficulties of technical, linguistic and methodological nature. Fairly often patent documents have complicated narrative style or imperfect translation, which hampers understanding and unambiguous interpretation. Incompleteness and imperfection of patent classification indices also exists. Moreover, in a number of inventions main specific keywords are either omitted or used in a completely different semantic meaning.
In the majority of cases the authors of the inventions provided in this database directly declared the ecological benefits of their patented solutions, these declarations intentionally were not disputed and, moreover, became one of the major criteria for retaining the inventions. When there were no direct statements, indirect features were analysed to link the essence of patent documents with ecological problems. For instance, a portion of inventions disclosing patented solutions related to: treatment of water; sealing or packing boreholes or wells; biocides; compositions for drilling of boreholes or wells; fracturing chemicals; drilling wastes utilization; fracturing fluid treatment, etc. were placed in the proposed database based on the conclusions about an associated potential improvement of ecological safety resulting from the perfection of main technological procedures. For example, it is beyond dispute that reduction in water consumption or improvement of water treatment in hydraulic fracturing operations will ultimately positively influence the water ecological balance in hydrocarbon production area. However, the degree of such positive influence should be obvious, and the implementation of the technical solutions proposed in the inventions should not lead to the formation of new ecological problems at any production stage. Certainly, such approach is used due to the lack of better options, and the creators of this product do not exclude the possibility of mistakes, however, it is hoped that their number does not go beyond the level of objectively unavoidable.
Each patent document in this database contains a list of conventional bibliographical indicators, including original title, English version of title, family size, application date, publication date, patenting office, names of inventors and applicants, document kind (patent or application), number of claims, number of citing, IPC indices, and core document number.
Also, as it was mentioned above, patent documents were additionally provided with specialized markers – generalized unified indicators that are combined in individual semantic groups: technology categories (indicate the applicability of technical solutions to one of the energy industry sectors); technology elements (indicators showing a level of detailing for the production process); problems (technical, economical, ecological and other problems); type of technical solution (device, method, composition).
All unified indicators can be simply and understandably interpreted and, just like the IPC indices, do not depend on linguistic or terminological variations. On the one hand, the list of technological indicators should reflect actual characteristic features of a patent document and energy sector under consideration, so that the detailing could be virtually infinite. On the other hand, it should be compact and convenient for work and analytical accounting. It is fairly difficult to find such compromise, therefore refinement of the list of indicators is always justified. The proposed database involves a little over 30 unified indicators.
Besides, the database contains a number of derived indicators, including applicant statuses, residence of applicants, and Unified Indicator Group. Indicators such as patent pending period, prominent patents, applicant's share in the aggregate intellectual property register can be calculated based on the available data. For a vast majority of patent documents rating points were also calculated on the basis of bibliographical and unified indicators.
General methodology of patent database compilation and statistical evaluation used in this product can be found at aenert.com.
Inasmuch as the database contains inventions aimed to resolve ecological problems, all patent documents therein are marked with corresponding unified indicators related to Ecological balance and Environmental protection measures problems. The former indicator predominantly combines inventions that somehow related to direct or potential reduction of risks of disruption of ecological balance of natural systems as the result of anthropogenic impact. The latter indicator was assigned to the inventions that mention problems related to environmental protection measures or their necessity. In the real world practice these problems often intersect or amend each other.
By combining different unified indicators and conventional indicators (IPC indices, names of applicants and inventors, key phrases from the titles of inventions) that are provided in the database it is possible to create exclusive lists of patent documents having sets of fairly refined specific criteria. For instance, when choosing Hydraulic fracturing technology category, Working fluids technology element, main subject problem Ecological balance, and additional problem High OPEX / Operation and consumables, type of technical solution – Composition, one can generate a list containing about 1200 out of more than 13000 documents, which would provide technical solutions aimed to reduce the costs of expendable materials of working fluids for hydraulic fracturing, simultaneously resolving ecological problems. Additional setting of any of the IPC indices assigned to the inventions, for instance, C02F group (Treatment of water, waste water, sewage, or sludge) will shorten the list to less than 30 documents. Such a list is sufficiently convenient to work with, for example, to perform additional classification by applicants, patent offices, etc. Also, it is possible to outline the most representative patent document group, in this case this would be a patent family with core document WO2016037149A1 "Method of water treatment utilizing a peracetate oxidant solution"; find documents with the highest bibliographical rating (US8722713B2 "Synergistic antimicrobial composition comprising 1,2-benzisothiazolin-3-one and tris (hydroxymethyl) nitromethane"); or determine the most active applicants (Clean Chemistry LLC (US), Dow Global Technologies, LLC (US), and Aegis Petroleum Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd (CN)).
When patent documents disclose specific ecological technologies, equipment or compositions, for instance, for taking ecological measures related to a preparation of production site, personnel health, remediation of soil, etc., they are marked with "Ecology & safety" technology element. Examples of such inventions are: US10221491B2, US8801897B2, US10233273B2
Key Highlights
Statistical analysis for the 20-year period between 2001-2020 includes:
Inventions: 12281
Offices: 50
Countries: 41
Applicants: 2185
Individual IPC subgroups: 3151
Total IPC subgroups assigned: 43355
The main body of the patent documents were registered between 2014 and 2019 with a peak of patenting activity in 2017. USPTO (US) patent office annually was the leader by the number of granted patents.
The highest activity in patenting their inventions was demonstrated by the residents of the United States with a share of more than 68% of the total number of patents granted during 2001-2020. Among other countries whose residents were granted at least 50 patents were China, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom.
The most popular IPC subgroup with a share of almost 4% was E21B43/26 – obtaining fluids from wells by forming crevices or fractures. Different methods as a type of technical solution were mentioned in almost 44% of cases, devices – in almost 20%, compositions – in 36%. In a considerable part of the inventions two or more types of technical solutions were mentioned simultaneously.
A separate portion of the statistical analysis is dedicated to applicants of patent documents. It includes the lists of applicants separately for patents and applications, breakdown of applicants' patent documents by offices, types of technical solution, problems, technology categories, IPC sections. The list of top 10 most productive applicants by the number of patents includes:
Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US)
Rohm and Haas Company (US)
Dow Global Technologies, LLC (US)
Baker Hughes Incorporated (US)
Schlumberger Technology Corporation (US)
M-I LLC (US)
Unilever N.V. (NL)
Schlumberger Technology B.V. (NL)
Ecolab USA Inc. (US)
Sinopec China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (CN)
The concluding part of the analysis includes calculated data that allow the resulting patenting trends to be exposed and main conclusions to be drawn. Such diagrams as the relationship of number of applicants to number of patents by year, relationship of number of single applications to total number by year, new applicants by year, top new IPC subgroups, and others, are presented here.
The proposed patent database allows the existing trends in the intellectual property market of the specified industrial sector to be timely traced. The patent database is targeted at inventors, engineers, researchers, managers and business administrators involved in the development of Oil & Gas production technologies from low permeability plays.
Disclaimer
The present patent database was prepared by EnerTechUp company and its partners. The patent database includes patent documents that were carefully collected from the publicly available sources and, according to the authors, to the greatest degree represent the latest innovations in the particular energy industry as of the date of the patent database preparation. Detailed information on the methodology of search and processing of patent documents is available at Advanced Energy Technologies (www.aenert.com). Considering the difficulties related to the compilation of lists of international patent documents, including those related to time frames, national and terminological barriers, as well as taking into consideration high labour intensity of collecting the required analytical information and performing its qualitative interpretation, the authors of the patent database cannot guarantee absolute completeness and accuracy of the represented materials and disclaim any responsibility for the use thereof. EnerTechUp represents this material “as is” and rejects any claims and liabilities arising from the use of data published therein, including, but not limited to: compensation for any type of financial damage, lost profit or compensation for moral injury. These stipulations also refer to employees, shareholders, agents and data suppliers of EnerTechUp.
