Cyclic Steam Stimulation and Steam Flooding Patents
Concentrated at the top. The five leading assignees hold 47.9% of the 522 records in scope, and the ten leading assignees hold 62.6% — a field with a dominant core and a long single-filing tail. Annual filings reached a peak of 24 in 2017. Using the last full three-year span the data supports, filings fell from 5 in 2021 to 0 in 2024, a -100% change — a marked pullback in new filing activity in this specific search string, though 2025 and 2026 figures remain incomplete and should not be read as confirming a continued decline.
- 1HALLIBURTON ENERGY SERVICES INC88
- 2MOBIL OIL CORP70
- 3CONOCOPHILLIPS CO34
- 4OPTASENSE HOLDINGS LIMITED33
- 5TEXACO INC25
See the full cyclic steam stimulation and steam flooding 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 this landscape
Who holds the most patents in cyclic steam stimulation and steam flooding?
Filing activity in this dataset is concentrated at the top: the five leading assignees together account for 47.9% of the 522 records in scope, and the ten leading assignees account for 62.6%. The single leading assignee holds 88 records, well ahead of the fifth-ranked entrant at 25 and the tenth-ranked entrant at 11. Beyond the ranked leaders there is a long tail of entities with only one or two filings each, which is typical of a mature oilfield-services niche rather than an emerging one.
Is patent filing in this space growing or shrinking?
Filings peaked at 24 in 2017 and have declined since. Looking at the last span the data can support as complete, annual filings dropped from 5 in 2021 to 0 in 2024, a -100% change. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, 2025 and 2026 figures in the underlying data are still incomplete and should not be read as proof the field has gone fully dormant, but the multi-year trend through 2024 is a real pullback in new filing activity captured by this specific search.
What technology areas get the most patent claims in steam-based heavy oil recovery?
Wellbore and completion mechanics dominate: the E21B subclass (earth and rock drilling for wells) appears on 95.4% of the 522 records in scope. Materials claims under C09K follow at 18.4%. Sensing- and measurement-related subclasses — geophysics, vibration, pressure — each account for under 4% of records, indicating that most claim effort goes into wellbore hardware and injection sequencing rather than into monitoring or materials science.
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 Cyclic Steam Stimulation and Steam Flooding 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.