UNCONVENTIONAL OIL.Latest published applications. 2017-2019. Steam injection
Summary
With global resources becoming scarce and energy demand growing drastically, unconventional oil will play an increasingly important role in the world's future. High viscosity hard-to-recover oils are expected to be a large contributor to the global energy needs. The heavy oil reservoirs are currently being developed, primarily through thermal enhanced oil recovery technologies, in particular by means of steam injection. The steam injected into the reservoir reduces the viscosity and density of oil and increases the flow rate in the reservoir. Although steam-driven recovery methods such as steam flooding, cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) and steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) are the most widely used and well proven EOR methods, there are a number of associated economic and technological challenges. These include high greenhouse gas emissions, difficulties in operation and equipment maintenance, steam condensation, extra operational costs due to loss of energy and severe steam channeling. Therefore, the latest technological innovations in the field are aimed at optimization of the quality of the steam injection process and its generation equipment, while reducing the environmental impact. The proposed patent bulletin will help interested experts review the latest developments, including information about leading applicants, patent offices, and prominent patent solutions.
The proposed bulletin is dedicated to steam injection and includes patent applications published in 2017-2019. Research methodology is available on the Advanced Energy Technologies website. The patent bulletin includes 2299 patent documents. The applications were registered in 31 patent offices around the world. 413 applicants from 26 countries participated in the development of the inventions. 1285 subgroups of the International Patent Classification were encountered in the patent documents.
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: USPTO (US), CNIPA (CN), WIPO, CIPO (CA), INPI (BR), 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 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: Baker Hughes Incorporated (USA), Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. (USA), PetroChina Company Limited (China), China Petroleum & Chemical Company (China), Dow Global Technologies, LLC (USA), ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company (USA), ConocoPhilips Company (USA), Schlumberger Technology Corporation (USA), Ecolab (USA) and ACERGY France SAS (France).
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 a part of patent family.
A list 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 registered patent applications is provided in the conclusive part of the bulletin.
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.
