Solvent Assisted Heavy Oil Recovery Patents: Who Leads 2026
Solvent Assisted Heavy Oil Recovery Patents: Leaders and Filing Trends
One IPC subclass dominates. 93.7% of the 79 records in scope carry an E21B (drilling/wells) classification, versus 24.1% for C09K materials — claim activity concentrates on wellbore and process mechanics, not chemistry. Filings ran from 8 in 2017 to a peak of 13 in 2018, then declined toward 0 in the most recently completed tracked years (2021 to 2024, a -100% span). 2025 and 2026 figures are still incomplete because publication trails filing by roughly 18 months, so the apparent drop-off should not yet be read as the technology going cold.
- 1CONOCOPHILLIPS CO27
- 2WEATHERFORD CANADA11
- 3CENOVUS ENERGY INC10
- 4IMPERIAL OIL RESOURCES LTD10
- 5CEC NORTH STAR ENERGY LTD9
See the full solvent assisted heavy oil recovery 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
What counts as solvent-assisted heavy oil recovery in this patent landscape?
This landscape covers patents combining solvent injection mechanisms — such as vapour/vapor extraction and expanding-solvent SAGD (ES-SAGD) — with the operational problems that determine whether those processes are economic, including solvent retention, asphaltene deposition, surface solvent recovery and solvent-steam ratio control. It excludes pure steam-only thermal recovery patents that do not reference a solvent component. The 79 records in this dataset were matched against a search string requiring both a recovery-mechanism term and an operational-problem term.
Who holds the most patents in solvent-assisted heavy oil recovery?
The ranking in this dataset covers 25 companies, with the leading assignee holding 27 records versus 9 at fifth place and 1 at tenth — a steep concentration rather than an even spread. Major oilfield-service and oil-sands operating companies dominate the ranked list. This is the full ranking the dataset returns, not a truncated top-list, so no filer outside these 25 appears with a comparable volume.
Has patent filing in this field slowed down?
Filing volume ran from 8 records in 2017 to a peak of 13 in 2018, then declined toward 0 in the most recently complete comparison years, 2021 to 2024, a -100% change over that span. However, patent publication typically lags actual filing by around 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 figures in the underlying data are still incomplete and should not be read as confirmation that R&D activity has stopped. A clearer picture of the true current trend will only be available once those later years finish publishing.
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 Solvent Assisted Heavy Oil Recovery 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.