UNCONVENTIONAL OIL. Latest granted patents 2016-2018. Chemical Stimulation
Non-thermal EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) methods, particularly chemical stimulation methods, have an important benefit over the thermal EOR methods that reside in low energy consumption, which usually comprises a major portion of production costs, and this is exceptionally important when world oil prices are fluctuating noticeably. However, the spread of chemical stimulation methods is limited by a relatively low threshold level of oil viscosity, high costs of chemical substances involved, low efficiency and velocity of processes (especially when they are based on diffusion interaction), and problems of end product treatment and utilization of hazardous waste. Currently, complex chemical activation methods for oil production, including injection of alkali, surfactant, alkali-polymer, surfactant-polymer, alkali-surfactant-polymer, etc. into a formation, can be particularly promising. Certain hopes are anchored on new kinds of polymer, such as colloidal dispersion gels. Also, hybrid variants are considered, for instance, combined solvent-plus-steam injection. The proposed bulletin includes a collection of recent patents on this subject and, combined with a brief statistical analysis, it provides the possibility to get an overview of the level of technical solutions achieved and major patent holders.
The present bulletin reviews patents granted by patent offices around the globe in 2016-2018 in the field related to chemical stimulation in unconventional oil. General research methodology can be found on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. 890 patent documents from 18 patent offices around the world are represented in the bulletin. In total, 284 applicants from 27 countries and 694 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), USPTO (US), CIPO (CA), Rospatent (RU), EPO.
For each of the patent documents selected for the examination in the present bulletin the characteristics of unified indicators were preliminary defined, they include: technical problems, types of inventive solutions employed, belonging to one or other technological segment. This allows the internal content for each of the indicators in the aggregate array of documents to be visualized, for instance, to define the sequence and proportional correlation of technical problems the inventive solutions disclosed in the texts aim to solve. A list of the top 10 groups consisting of patent documents with identical unified indicators contains ID numbers and applicant names of respective documents; the groups are sorted by the number of patent documents.
The following information can be found for the top 10 applicants: breakdown of documents 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: Sinopec China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (China), Sinopec SRIPT Shanghai Research Institute of Petrochemical Technology (China), Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry (China), BASF AG (Germany), CNOOC China National Offshore Oil Corporation (China), PetroChina Company Limited (China), Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (Netherlands), Dow Global Technologies, LLC (USA), Baker Hughes Incorporated (USA) and Nalco Company (USA).
The prominent documents pages contain the top 10 patents with the highest bibliographical rating, the most extensive coverage of IPC sections, and the shortest patent pending time.
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 the granted patents.
Who needs this bulletin?
The statistics bulletin under examination serves as one of the variants to monitor advanced technical achievements in the specified industrial sector. The statistical data, rating evaluations and carefully selected patent documents provided in the bulletin can be of interest for inventors, students and educators, engineers, as well as for businessmen and investors, who in one way or another are concerned with the problems of the development of unconventional oil production technologies.
