The dataset ranks 67 companies by patent family count, and the leading assignee holds 27 of the 193 records in scope, well clear of the fifth-ranked company at 11. This gap means the leader has broad coverage rather than a single dominant claim, so a freedom-to-operate check needs to look across that assignee’s full portfolio, not one patent. The top ten assignees together hold 69.9% of all records, so the rest of the field is a long tail of smaller filers.

Minimum miscibility pressure, or MMP, is the pressure above which an injected gas becomes miscible with reservoir oil, and it governs how much oil a gas-injection project can recover. Because MMP determines project economics, a large share of the patent activity in this dataset covers ways to measure, predict or lower it — including slim-tube experiment methods and, in more recent filings, chemical additives such as ionic liquids. The recent record US12516236B1 is a direct example, claiming an ionic-liquid additive that reduces MMP by at least 10% for high-asphaltene crude.

Filing peaked at 17 records in 2020 and then declined across complete years, falling from 11 records in 2021 to 3 in 2024 — a 73% drop over that span. Because publication lags actual filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in the dataset are still incomplete and should not be read as confirming a continued slowdown. The safest reading is that filing has pulled back meaningfully from its 2020 peak, with the most recent trend still unresolved.