DIRECTIONAL DRILLING & HYDRAULIC FRACTURING. Ecology & Environment. Patent Bulletin. 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.
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 the number of applications to the number of patents by year, the relationship of the 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 information bulletin allows the existing trends in the intellectual property market of the specified industrial sector to be timely traced. The patent bulletin 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 bulletin was prepared by EnerTechUp company and its partners. The patent bulletin 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 bulletin 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 bulletin 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.
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