BIOENERGY. Latest published applications 2015-2017. Landfill Gas
Summary
Municipal solid waste landfills are one of the largest sources of human-related greenhouse emissions worldwide. At the same time, capturing emissions from landfills gives a great opportunity to generate renewable energy from landfill gas (LFG), which is composed of methane, carbon dioxide (CO2) and trace amounts of other organic compounds. Nowadays, many countries employ proven technologies to convert LFG into energy preventing it from being released to the atmosphere and producing various forms of energy, including electricity, combined heat and power, alternate vehicle fuel, pipeline fuel and steam. The USA is leading the way in landfill gas production with about 600 operational facilities. Brazil is also making great strides in the LFG industry, opening a plant in Caieiras in 2016, São Paulo that treats 8,000 tons of urban waste a day, supplying electricity to a city of 300,000 inhabitants. Despite the fact that every country in the world has a huge resource base for the production of this type of bioenergy, LFG production technologies have not yet found a widespread application around the world. Major challenges are related to high operational and maintenance costs, plant siting, transportation and supply to a community, safety issues, and environmental impact. The statistical information presented in this bulletin provides an overview of latest patent applications in this area around the world.
The present bulletin reviews patent applications registered by patent offices around the globe in 2015-2017 in the field related to landfill gas. General research methodology can be found on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. 618 patent documents from 33 patent offices around the world are represented in the bulletin. In total, 276 applicants from 25 countries and 514 subgroups of the International Patent Classification are mentioned.
Key Highlights
The bulletin provides general statistical figures, including the overall 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 most popular patent offices among the applicants were: CNIPA (CN), WIPO, USPTO (US), EPO, CIPO (CA), IP Australia (AU), KIPO (KR) and JPO (JP).
From the analysis of texts of patent 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 patent documents 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), Evonik Fibres Gmbh (AT), Osaka Gas Corporation (JP), Mustang Sampling LLC (US), Renescience AS (DK), Johnson Matthey Plc (GB), UOP LLC (US), Haldor Topsoe A/S (DK), King Abdulaziz University (SA), Chevron USA, Inc. (US).
The bulletin contains lists of the top 10 prominent documents having the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, and those not being part a 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 registered patent applications.
Who needs this bulletin?
The data provided in the proposed bulletin is a timely reflection of the transformations that take place in the intellectual property sector of the industrial direction concerned. A thoroughly edited selection of patent documents can become a good complement to your library of available technical solutions. The bulletin is targeted at inventors, engineers, researchers, managers and business administrators involved in the development of bio energy production technologies.
