Managed Pressure Drilling Safety and Compliance Patent Landscape 2026
- Filing activity peaked in 2020 at 58 records and has declined since, with the midpoint year 2022 already down to 27 — the growth curve is flat to negative, not accelerating.
- Rotating control device patents from the mid-2000s still anchor the field the most-cited record, US20110024195A1, has 197 citations — well ahead of anything filed in the last five years.
- Assignee momentum has gone quiet across the board every tracked assignee, including Schlumberger and Halliburton entities, shows 0 filings in the latest year, consistent with the ~18-month publication lag rather than a real pullback.
Filing growth compares 2021 (25 records) with 2024 (3) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 309 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent families at the intersection of managed pressure drilling (MPD) and core well-control safety functions — kick detection, blowout prevention and influx management — restricted to drilling and well-construction IPC classes (E21B21/08, E21B33, E21B44). It is a claims-and-abstract search, so it captures documents that actually argue safety or compliance mechanics rather than every patent that merely mentions MPD in passing.
309 published families sit inside the window 2015 to mid-2026. Filing rose through the late 2010s, peaked in 2020, and has been trending down since — a pattern worth checking against rig-count and capex cycles in offshore and unconventional drilling before reading it as technology exhaustion.
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Filing trend and classification mix
Two views of the same 309-family set: how filing volume moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
A 2020 peak followed by a multi-year decline
Filings ran from 15 in 2017 to a peak of 58 in 2020, then eased back to 27 by 2022 and toward zero in the most recent, still-incomplete year. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the last one to two years will always look thinner than they eventually turn out to be — but the decline from 2020 to 2022 predates that lag window and looks real.
Concentrated in drilling hardware, thin in software and controls
E21B (earth and rock drilling) covers all 309 families by definition of the search; the next largest group, C09K (materials), sits at just 19. Control-systems classes — G05D at 8 and G05B at 6 — and digital-processing class G06F at 6 are each a small fraction of the set, which says the claim space around automated kick-detection logic and control software is thinly populated relative to the hardware side.
Shares are the percentage of the 309 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
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Try EurekaThe documents setting the boundaries
Automated workflows using transient, multiphase analysis to improve well control planning for managed pressure drilling operations
An Influx Management Envelope (IME) for MPD is generated through a cloud-based, parallelized workflow that parameterizes influx scenarios with a transient multiphase flow engine, establishing kick tolerance thresholds and assessing kick-circulation risk under MPD. The parallel computing approach speeds IME generation and folds simulation results into an operational envelope meant to support real-time drilling decisions.Filed by Schlumberger Technology Corporation; published 2025-07-31.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20110024195A1 | Drilling with a high pressure rotating control device | 197 |
| 2 | US20080105434A1 | Offshore Universal Riser System | 157 |
| 3 | US20080210471A1 | Rotating control device docking station | 112 |
| 4 | US20070095540A1 | Apparatus and method for managed pressure drilling | 65 |
| 5 | US20060191716A1 | Well drilling and production using a surface blowout preventer | 63 |
| 6 | EP2378056A2 | Drilling fluid pressure control system for a floating rig | 43 |
| 7 | US20160298401A1 | Automatic choke optimization and selection for managed pressure drilling | 42 |
| 8 | US20230235635A1 | Remote intelligent active drilling pressure control system and method | 37 |
| 9 | US8347983B2 | Drilling with a high pressure rotating control device | 37 |
| 10 | US20170226813A1 | Control of Hydraulic Power Flowrate for Managed Pressure Drilling | 34 |
Citation counts inside this corpus reward older filings; treat the ranking as a map of influence on downstream art, not a list of what matters for a 2026 filing strategy.
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Read together, the trend, the classification split and the receiving-office spread point to a technology that is well-established in hardware and jurisdiction coverage but has stopped expanding.
Growth has flattened, not accelerated
The peak year, 2020, sits well above the 2022 midpoint of 27, and the count keeps falling toward the present. Combined with the ~18-month lag on the newest data, this is a field in consolidation rather than one still opening up new claim territory.
Hardware dominates; controls and software are thin
Every family in the set carries an E21B classification, as the search requires, but the next most common class, C09K (materials), covers only 19 records. G05D, G05B and G06F together account for a small slice, showing that automated control-logic and digital-workflow claims are comparatively underfiled against physical rotating-control-device and blowout-preventer hardware.
US and European filing leads a broad multi-office spread
The United States and the European Patent Office receive the largest shares, with Australia, Canada, the UK and WIPO/PCT filings all in double digits behind them. That spread signals applicants are pursuing multi-jurisdiction protection typical of offshore and cross-border drilling operations, not a single home-market strategy.
Influence sits with 2000s-era rotating control device art
The five most-cited records in this set were all published between 2006 and 2011, led by a rotating control device patent at 197 citations. Recent filings, including the 2025 Schlumberger IME record, have not yet had time to accumulate comparable citation counts — a function of corpus age, not of technical weight.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to managed pressure drilling safety and compliance, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the ground
Filing is concentrated among a small group of oilfield-services incumbents, with co-assignment patterns showing internal restructuring among Schlumberger entities more than external collaboration.
Co-filing is mostly intra-group, not cross-company
The strongest co-assignee pair links two Schlumberger technology entities at 11 shared families, and two of the next three strongest pairs also pair Schlumberger subsidiaries together. This points to corporate restructuring and entity renaming across filing years rather than genuine joint-development partnerships with outside firms.
Every major assignee shows zero filings in the most recent year
Weatherford, SafeKick Americas, Halliburton Energy Services and both tracked Schlumberger entities all report 0 filings in the latest year, with the Schlumberger entities also showing -100% YoY. Given the ~18-month publication lag, this is best read as an incomplete data window rather than a genuine industry-wide halt.
A services-incumbent core with a long tail of single-filers
The assignee ranking is dominated by a handful of large oilfield-services groups and their subsidiary entities, consistent with the co-assignment concentration above. Beyond that core, filing activity thins into single-record entrants, a pattern typical of mature drilling-hardware fields rather than an emerging niche.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Weatherford Technology Holdings, LLC | 0 | -100% |
| Weatherford/Lamb, Inc. | 0 | — |
| SAFEKICK AMERICAS LLC | 0 | — |
| Halliburton Energy Services, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Schlumberger Technology, LLC | 0 | — |
| Schlumberger Technology Corporation | 0 | -100% |
| Schlumberger Limited | 0 | -100% |
| Dynamic Pressure Control, LLC | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a mature hardware core and a thin, still-open control-software layer. Two directions follow from that.
Stress-test freedom to operate around control logic
With G05D, G05B and G06F together covering a small share of the 309 families, a proposed kick-detection or influx-management algorithm has more room to move than a rotating-control-device design would. Run a claims-level check against the recent Schlumberger IME filing and similar cloud-workflow records before committing engineering time.
Explore control-logic claims in EurekaTrack the Schlumberger entity consolidation
The strongest co-assignee pairs all involve Schlumberger subsidiaries filing together, and momentum data shows those same entities at zero in the latest tracked year. Understanding which entity now holds active prosecution rights matters for any licensing or opposition strategy in this space.
Map assignee entity structure in EurekaCommon questions on this landscape
This landscape is built around E21B21/08, E21B33 and E21B44, the drilling and well-construction subclasses that cover rotating control devices, blowout preventers and related well-control hardware. All 309 families in the dataset carry an E21B classification because that is a condition of the search. Secondary classes appear far less often — C09K (materials) at 19 records, and control-systems classes G05D and G05B in single digits — showing that most patent activity sits in physical drilling hardware rather than software or materials science.
No, the trend has been flat to declining since 2020. Filings rose from 15 in 2017 to a peak of 58 in 2020, then fell back to 27 by the 2022 midpoint and continued down toward the present. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the most recent one to two years are undercounted, but the decline visible from 2020 to 2022 predates that lag effect and reflects a genuine slowdown in new filing activity.
Filing is concentrated among established oilfield-services groups, with Schlumberger-affiliated entities appearing repeatedly across the co-assignment data — the strongest co-assignee pair links two Schlumberger technology entities at 11 shared families. Halliburton, Weatherford and specialist well-control firms such as SafeKick Americas also appear in the assignee ranking. Beyond this core group, the ranking thins into a long tail of entities with only one or a few filings, which is typical of a mature, hardware-heavy drilling niche.
It is a Schlumberger Technology Corporation filing, published 2025-07-31, describing a cloud-based workflow that generates an Influx Management Envelope (IME) for managed pressure drilling using a transient, multiphase flow engine. The workflow parameterizes influx scenarios in parallel to establish kick tolerance thresholds and assess risk during kick circulation, then folds the simulation output into an operational envelope for well-control decision-making. For someone building automated MPD planning tools, the relevant boundary is the specific combination of cloud-parallelized transient multiphase simulation with IME generation for kick tolerance, not multiphase flow modelling or IME concepts in isolation.
The clearest gap sits in control software and digital workflows rather than physical equipment: G05D, G05B and G06F together cover a small fraction of the 309 families, against near-total coverage of the drilling-hardware class E21B. Sub-areas such as automated kick-detection control logic, cloud-based influx management envelope generation, and real-time drilling-fluid rheology sensing for control appear thinly claimed relative to rotating control devices and blowout preventer hardware. Any team targeting this space should still run a full claims search, since thin IPC coverage does not guarantee an open path around specific existing filings like the 2025 Schlumberger IME record.
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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.