UNCONVETIONAL OIL PRODUCTION. Gas injection or water flooding. Patent Bulletin. Aenert. April 2022
Introduction
Petroleum fuel still remains the main energy source for an extensive list of consumers' sectors, primarily including transport and heating, but in a number of countries – also electric energy production. Despite the fact that the share of renewable energy sources in overall end-use energy consumption keeps growing steadily, in the coming two-three decades fossil fuel will continue to play a key role in the global energy balance. This situation is aggravated by a noticeable depletion of light oil reserves and an ever-growing involvement of its heavy grades into circulation. Efficient extraction of such oil requires unconventional approaches based on Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods. In particular, water flooding or gas injection technologies became widespread, including in combination with additional chemical activators. Such techniques as, for instance, carbon dioxide injection, polymer flooding, water flooding involving surface-active agents, and other technological variants are particularly attractive.
The use of CO2 to increase oil recovery rate is pretty widespread in production practices, particularly in the USA. Carbon dioxide is miscible with crude oil, it ensures reduction in the oil viscosity, which is the most critical aspect of heavy oil production. In many scenarios the use of CO2 is less expensive than other chemical substances and gases used in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations. During the polymer flooding, polymer-augmented water is injected into an oil-formation. Inasmuch as such polymers consist of long-chain molecules with high molecular weight, they allow to increase the viscosity of water. In its turn, it increases oil production rates by decreasing the water/oil mobility ratio. Water flooding involving surface-active agents (surfactants) is a well proven method of oil recovery increase, and its use is considerably expanding, including the cases of heavy oil production. Surfactants ensure the lowering of interfacial tension, improve the wettability of porous rocks, increase water mobility. This allows larger volumes of oil to be displaced in complex reservoirs.
A significant part of effective technical solutions aimed at the development of these technologies is concentrated in patent documents registered with various patent offices.
Methodology
This patent information bulletin includes a statistical analysis of major attributes of patents and patent applications published in the 20-year period from 2002 to 2021. The bulletin partially reflects the contents of patent database "UNCONVENTIONAL OIL PRODUCTION. Gas injection or water flooding" for 1995-2022.
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 exist. Moreover, in a number of inventions, main specific keywords are either omitted or used in a completely different semantic meaning. Each patent document in this database contains a list of conventional bibliographical indicators, including original title, English version of the title, family size, application date, publication date, patenting office, names of inventors and applicants, document kind (patent or aplication), 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 unconventional oil types); 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). Besides, the database contains a number of derived indicators, including applicant statuses, the residence of applicants, and Unified Indicator Group. Indicators such as patent pending period, prominent patents, applicant's share in the aggregate intellectual property registry 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. 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 2002-2021 includes:
Inventions: 8004
Offices: 49
Countries: 44
Applicants: 1596
Individual IPC subgroups: 2011
Total IPC subgroups assigned: 24868
In total, 8004 patent documents (2805 patents and 5199 patent applications) were found for the present bulletin. The most active registration of patent applications took place in 2019-2020. In the 20-year period patents were granted in 30 patent offices around the world. The most popular patent offices with applicants were CNIPA (China), USPTO (US), Rospatent (RU), CIPO (CA), EPO, and IP Australia (AU). In recent years the largest share of registered patent applications was in CNIPA (China), and a considerable increase in patenting activity was seen in INPI (BR).
1596 applicants from 44 countries participated in the preparation of the inventions. About 30% of patents were granted to US applicants and more than 16% to China applicants. The share of China residents has grown substantially in applicants who registered their applications in the last five years.
IPC indices E21B43/20 (displacing by water), E21B43/16 (enhanced recovery methods for obtaining hydrocarbons); E21B43/22 (use of chemicals or bacterial activity); and E21B43/24 (using heat, e.g. steam injection) were assigned to patents more than others.
Such problem as “Low efficiency of primary production” was frequently mentioned in patents and patent applications. Along with “Gas injection or water flooding”, Technology elements “Steam injection” and “Chemical stimulation” were frequently mentioned in patents and patent applications.
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:
ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (US)
Baker Hughes Incorporated (US)
Tatneft (RU)
Saudi Arabian Oil Company (SA)
ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (US)
Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (US)
Shell Internationale Research Maatschappij B.V. (NL)
General Electric (US)
CNPC China National Petroleum Corporation (CN)
BP Exploration (GB)
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, and others, are also presented here.
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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