Casing Design & Tubular Selection Patents: Leaders & Trends 2026
Casing Design and Tubular Selection Patents: Concentration, Momentum and Open Ground
Top-heavy field. the top 5 assignees hold 206 of 364 records in scope (56.6%), and the top 10 hold 79.7% — a long tail of single-filing entrants fills the rest. Filings ran from 15 in 2017 to a peak of 17 in 2022, then continued with 2021 at 1 and 2024 at 5 — a +400% rise across that three-year span. 2025 and 2026 figures are understated because publication typically lags filing by about 18 months; treat the tail as incomplete rather than a slowdown.
- 1LANDMARK GRAPHICS CORP91
- 2SCHLUMBERGER HLDG LTD34
- 3SCHLUMBERGER TECH CORP31
- 4HALLIBURTON ENERGY SERVICES INC26
- 5SCHLUMBERGER CANADA LTD24
See the full casing design and tubular selection analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on casing design patents
Who are the leading patent holders in casing design and tubular selection?
The assignee ranking built from this dataset is led by one company with 91 of the 364 records in scope, well ahead of fifth place at 24 records. The top 5 assignees together hold 56.6% of all records, and the top 10 hold 79.7%, so the field is concentrated among a small group of large oilfield service companies rather than spread evenly across many filers. Below tenth place, the ranking extends through 80 companies total, most filing only a handful of records each.
Is casing design patent activity growing or slowing down?
Filings rose from 1 in 2021 to 5 in 2024, a +400% increase over that span, and the peak year in the dataset so far is 2022 with 17 filings. The 2025 and 2026 figures look lower, but that is expected: publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years are always undercounted in any patent dataset. Treat the recent-year dip as incomplete data rather than a genuine slowdown.
How much of this technology area is software versus hardware?
The great majority of records, 71.2% of the 364 in scope, fall in IPC class E21B covering earth and rock drilling for wells — confirming this is primarily a physical wellbore-hardware field. However, G06F (electric digital data processing) appears on 15.4% of records and G06Q (business and administrative data processing) on 12.4%, showing that well-planning and simulation software is a meaningful secondary layer claimed alongside the hardware. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC codes, these shares add up to more than 100% of the record total.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Casing Design and Tubular Selection covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.