DIRECTIONAL DRILLING & HYDRAULIC FRACTURING. Energy, Gas & Water consumption. Patent Database. Aenert. November 2021
Summary
Oil and gas production from low-permeability plays in the majority of cases requires the employment of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies. This is necessary to increase the contact area of the well with a formation rich in oil or gas, and to improve the permeability of the rock. Taking into consideration the increase in the share of hard-to-recover reserves in the global hydrocarbon balance, it becomes clear that the use of these technologies will keep steadily growing.
Presently, the ratio of conventional vertical to directional wellbores is shifting towards the latter group in some countries. At the same time, in the real world the costs of directional drilling in average comprise from several hundred to 1.5-2 thousand US dollars per 1 meter, depending on specific objectives and conditions of drilling, thus reaching several million US dollars per wellbore. Costs related to energy necessary to power the drilling machinery comprise a considerable portion of the total expenses in this case, mainly in the form of electric energy, gas or liquid fuel.
Another key problem of oil and gas production from low-permeability plays employing hydraulic fracturing technologies is high fresh water consumption. Increased water consumption during fracking is determined by the very essence of the technological operation, which is based on hydraulic action. Typically, average fresh water consumption used in hydraulic fracturing starts from 10 million litres per wellbore, but in some cases – considerably more. Extraction and reutilization of pumped water rarely exceeds 50%, as treating and removal of large volumes of wastewater resulting from hydraulic fracturing is an expensive procedure. As a result, water supply comprises a substantial portion of operating expenses in oil and gas production activities involving hydraulic fracturing, often exceeding 10%. This is particularly important for deposits located in arid regions that are rich in shale hydrocarbons.
In addition to high operational costs, inefficient use of energy, gas or water in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations considerably determines the degree of ecological impact on hydrocarbon extraction regions and, on a global scale – on the environment of the entire planet. In this regard, thorough planning of hydrocarbon production with the involvement of the most recent advances in resource- and energy-saving in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies is considered as one of the highest-priority tasks in oil and gas industry.
A considerable portion of efficient technical solutions aimed to resolve the aforementioned problems is concentrated in patent documents registered in various patent offices. However, subject-oriented search, precise selection and systematization of such documents are associated with substantial difficulties of technical, linguistic and methodological nature. First of all, this is related to the fact that currently neither the existing marking of inventions, nor the search options proposed in patent databases allow a comprehensive and reliable selection of patents and patent applications corresponding to the criteria above to be performed. In the publisher's view, the proposed original patent database, in which each patent document has undergone a thorough subject-oriented evaluation and was provided with additional semantic markers to the fullest extent reflects the state-of-the-art advancements in the reduction of energy, gas and water consumption in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies.
Key Highlights
The present database contains patents and patent applications granted or registered by patent offices around the globe in 1993–2021 in the field related to energy, gas & water consumption in oil & gas production from low permeability plays. General research methodology can be found on the Advanced Energy Technologies website – www.aenert.com. The database contains 4566 patent documents registered in patent offices around the world since 1993 that were published in publicly-available patent databases, found in the result of a deliberate patent search, and processed in accordance with the methodology by the date of compilation of this database (November, 2021).
A free demo version of this database can be downloaded here:
The demo version presents the first hundred patent documents, as well as some of the statistical information. In most cases, statistical diagrams and tables are limited to the first positions, the rest are hidden by symbols ###. In the full version the statistical information is presented in full and the diagrams are calculated automatically.
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, all documents are provided with additional markers – unified indicators that include: technology categories (indicate the applicability of technical solutions to one of the energy industry sectors, as stated by the authors of the inventions); technology elements (indicators with a specific level of detailing for the production process in a particular energy industry sector); problems (technical, economical, ecological and other problems declared by the authors in a patent document); type of technical solution (device, method, composition).
The database contains a number of derived indicators, including applicant statuses, residence of applicants, 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.
Additional marking of patent documents represented in the database makes it possible to form exclusive lists of patent documents having any remarkable characteristics, such as top prominent documents by rating, top prominent documents by number of IPC sections, top prominent single applications, etc.
The database also includes statistical analysis for major parameters of patent documents published during the 20-year period between 2001-2020. In particular, the statistical analysis includes a breakdown of documents by publication dates, by patent families, by patent offices, by residents and non-residents, and by applicant countries.
Statistical analysis includes:
Inventions: 4201
Offices: 40
Countries: 32
Applicants: 1059
Individual IPC subgroups: 1396
Total IPC subgroups assigned: 14616
The main body of the patent documents were registered between 2014 and 2020 with a peak of patenting activity in 2017. With rare exceptions, 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 60% of the total number of patents granted during 2001-2020. Among other countries whose residents were granted at least 30 patents were China, Canada, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, France, and Russia.
The most popular IPC subgroup with a share of almost 6.1% was E21B43/26 - obtaining fluids from wells by forming crevices or fractures. Different methods as a type of technical solution were mentioned in almost 50% of cases, different devices – in almost 29.5%, while different compositions – in 20.5%. 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, by types of technical solution, by problems, by technology categories, by IPC sections. The list of top 10 most productive applicants by the number of patents includes:
Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US)
Baker Hughes Incorporated (US)
Schlumberger Technology Corporation (US)
Evolution Well Services, LLC (US)
Saudi Arabian Oil Company (SA)
Tatneft (RU)
Enventure Global Technology (US)
CNPC CCDC Chuanqing Drilling Engineering Company Limited (CN)
Schlumberger Technology B.V. (NL)
Evolution Engineering Inc. (CA)
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 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.
Who needs this database?
The proposed patent database allows the existing trends in the intellectual property market of the specified industrial sector to be timely traced, as well as provides the possibility of acquiring a carefully selected list of patent documents fully corresponding to the specified subject. The 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 database was prepared by EnerTechUp company and its partners. The 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 database preparation. Detailed information on the methodology of search and processing of patent documents is available at Advanced Energy Technologies website (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 database cannot guarantee absolute completeness and accuracy of the represented materials and disclaim any responsibility for the use thereof. EnerTechUp company 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 company.
