Enhanced Oil Recovery Drilling Patents: Who Leads, Filing Trends 2026
- Filing has cooled since its 2019 peak. 64 families filed that year against a flat-to-declining midpoint of 22 in 2022, meaning claim pressure on core injection-well methods is easing, not intensifying.
- Chemistry sits inside the drilling claims, not beside them. C09K materials appear in 515 of 889 E21B records, so a large share of "drilling" filings are really injection-fluid or additive claims wrapped around a wellbore method.
- Named assignees have gone quiet in the latest year. Every tracked major — from 沙特阿拉伯石油公司 to 国际壳牌研究有限公司 — shows zero filings in the most recent year, though publication lag means this understates true activity.
What this landscape covers
This dataset tracks 895 patent families filed or published between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine enhanced oil recovery (EOR) terminology with drilling-specific claim language: injection well configuration, horizontal drilling, well placement and smart completion. The search deliberately narrows to three IPC subclasses inside E21B so the result set is method-and-hardware claims rather than the much broader EOR chemistry literature.
Filing offices skew heavily toward the United States and Canada, consistent with EOR's concentration in North American heavy-oil and mature-field operations, with a secondary cluster of PCT and European filings suggesting selective international protection rather than broad global filing.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 895-family corpus: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Filings ran from 45 in 2017 to a peak of 64 in 2019, then eased toward 22 by the 2022 midpoint and down to single digits by 2026. The final year or two is always undercounted because publication trails filing by roughly 18 months, so read the tail as a floor, not a ceiling.
IPC subclass distribution
E21B (drilling and wells) anchors nearly the entire set at 889 records, with C09K (materials) present in 515 — over half — showing that injection-fluid and additive chemistry is claimed jointly with the wellbore method far more often than as a standalone filing. Smaller subclasses like C10G, B01D, C12P and C02F mark adjacent processing and treatment steps that appear only incidentally.
Go deeper on Enhanced Oil Recovery Drilling Technology with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about enhanced oil recovery drilling technology and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited prior art in this space
US20170226833A1 — Multi-Directional Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR) Method
Methods for enhanced oil recovery that remove oil from a reservoir served by an injection well, a producing well and multiple lenses spanning between them. Primary oil is recovered by alternating injections of water and carbon dioxide into the injection well, moving oil in a first direction toward the producing well; a second, differently oriented recovery step follows for a secondary set of lenses.Filed by GRAFF, FRANK THOMAS, published 2017-08-10.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US5211230A | Method for enhanced oil recovery through a horizontal production well in a subsurface formation by in-situ co… | 415 |
| 2 | US5082055A | Gas fired radiant tube heater | 364 |
| 3 | US4787452A | Disposal of produced formation fines during oil recovery | 316 |
| 4 | US4228854A | Enhanced oil recovery using electrical means | 314 |
| 5 | US5020596A | Enhanced oil recovery system with a radiant tube heater | 300 |
| 6 | US5411086A | Oil recovery by enhanced imbitition in low permeability reservoirs | 282 |
| 7 | US4319635A | Method for enhanced oil recovery by geopressured waterflood | 223 |
| 8 | US4199025A | Method and apparatus for tertiary recovery of oil | 223 |
| 9 | US4762543A | Carbon dioxide recovery | 213 |
| 10 | US4052176A | Production of purified synthesis gas h' 2'-rich gas, and by-product co' 2'-rich gas | 181 |
Citation counts are pulled from a searched corpus and skew toward older filings simply because they have had longer to accumulate citations — treat this as a signal of influence on later filers, not of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three patterns in the data matter more than any single ranking: the timing of peak activity, where chemistry and hardware claims overlap, and how thin the co-filing network is.
Activity has cooled from its 2019 high
The corpus peaked at 64 families in 2019 and has trended down since, sitting at 22 by the 2022 midpoint. That is a declining or flat trajectory, not a technology in an early growth phase — new entrants are filing into a claim space that is no longer expanding.
Injection chemistry rides inside drilling claims
More than half of the E21B (drilling/wells) records also carry a C09K (materials) tag. Method claims for injection wells and horizontal placement are frequently bundled with a specific fluid or additive composition, which narrows the scope any single claim actually covers.
Collaboration is rare and concentrated
Only ten co-assignee pairs appear across the entire dataset, and the strongest is a single equipment-and-inventor pairing at 25 shared records. Most assignees file alone, so cross-licensing or joint-venture signals in this field are the exception rather than the norm.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to enhanced oil recovery drilling technology, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds ground, and where the gate sits
Filing activity is dominated by a small set of oil majors and equipment specialists, with a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants behind them.
林德股份公司 anchors the densest collaboration
The pairing of 林德股份公司 with inventor BABCOCK JOHN A produces the single strongest co-assignee link in the dataset at 25 shared records, well ahead of the next closest pair.
沙特阿拉伯石油公司 has gone quiet on paper
Filing activity from 沙特阿拉伯石油公司 shows a -100% year-on-year drop to zero in the most recent tracked year, a pattern shared by every other major named assignee in this corpus.
国际壳牌研究有限公司 and 壳牌石油公司 file jointly
This intra-group pairing points to internal research-to-operations filing structure rather than external collaboration, a pattern typical of integrated majors protecting the same invention across subsidiaries.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) | 0 | -100% |
| Chevron U.S.A. Inc. | 0 | — |
| Linde AG | 0 | — |
| Mobil Oil Corporation | 0 | — |
| Texaco Development Corporation | 0 | — |
| Shell International Research Maatschappij B.V. | 0 | — |
| BABCOCK JOHN A | 0 | — |
| Shell Oil Company | 0 | — |
Turning this landscape into a filing or freedom-to-operate decision
The dataset shows where claims sit today; the next step is checking a specific concept against them.
Check a concept against the cited prior art
Run a candidate injection-well or completion method against the most-cited records here, particularly the in-situ combustion and radiant-tube-heater families that still anchor citation networks.
Explore in EurekaMap the C09K overlap before drafting claims
Because over half of E21B records carry a materials tag, drafting a method claim without addressing the fluid or additive composition risks running into bundled prior art.
Explore in EurekaWatch for delayed publication in recent filings
The apparent drop-off in the last one to two years is partly a lag artefact. Re-run the assignee momentum view periodically rather than treating the current tail as final.
Explore in EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
The dataset shows a small cluster of oil majors and equipment specialists holding the densest filing positions, including 沙特阿拉伯石油公司, 雪佛龙美国公司, 林德股份公司 and 国际壳牌研究有限公司. Behind this group sits a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants, which is typical of a mature, method-heavy patent space. None of these named leaders shows filings in the most recent tracked year, though that is partly explained by publication lag rather than an actual halt in R&D.
No — filing peaked at 64 families in 2019 and has declined since, sitting at 22 by the 2022 midpoint and falling further toward the most recent year. This is a flat-to-declining trajectory rather than an emerging technology curve. The apparent drop in the final year or two should be read cautiously, since publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months.
Method claims, tagged under IPC E21B, cover the physical well configuration: injection well placement, horizontal drilling paths and completion hardware. Chemistry claims, tagged under C09K, cover the injection fluids, additives or materials used during recovery. In this dataset the two are frequently combined — more than half of E21B records also carry a C09K tag — so many patents are best understood as a specific fluid used with a specific wellbore method, not a pure hardware or pure chemistry claim.
The core injection-well and horizontal-drilling methods are densely claimed, but several adjacent branches show comparatively thin filing: microbial or fermentation-based recovery approaches, produced-fluid separation hardware, and water-treatment tie-ins connected to recovery operations. These sit at the edges of the search's IPC scope with only a couple dozen records each, versus 889 for the core drilling subclass, suggesting room for narrowly scoped claims that combine core recovery methods with these secondary processes.
Not necessarily. Citation counts accumulate over time within a searched corpus, so older patents such as the in-situ combustion and radiant-tube-heater families in this dataset naturally show higher citation totals simply because they have existed longer and had more opportunity to be cited. High citation counts are better read as a signal of historical influence on how later patents were drafted, not as evidence that the underlying technology is still the commercial standard today.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.