Turquoise hydrogen is produced by methane pyrolysis, splitting methane into hydrogen gas and solid carbon without the CO2 emissions of steam reforming (grey/blue hydrogen) or the electrolysis infrastructure of green hydrogen. In this dataset the patent activity is small and recent — 16 families total, with filing only picking up meaningfully from around 2022 and peaking in 2024. That is consistent with methane pyrolysis being an earlier-stage, less-filed route than either electrolysis or steam-reforming-with-capture technologies, which have far larger patent bases.

The assignee set in this corpus is a mix of energy majors, university research offices and specialist startups, including West Virginia University's governing board, Saudi Aramco, SK Innovation, BASF and smaller players such as Sustaion and independent inventor Michael Gurin. None of the tracked assignees show growth in the latest year — several show a 0% or -100% year-on-year change — which reflects both the corpus's small size and normal publication lag rather than a retreat from the field. Filing counts and rankings for each are rendered in the players table on this page.

US20240059559A1 (published from a filing dated 2024-02-22) claims a reactor device and method that heats a methane-pyrolysis catalyst using both a thermal fluid and microwave irradiation simultaneously, producing hydrogen and a crystalline carbon material such as carbon nanotubes. The claim scope is tied to that dual-heating combination specifically, so reactor designs using only electrical substrate heating or only molten-catalyst-medium heating sit outside its literal claims. Anyone designing a hybrid-heated pyrolysis reactor should treat this family as a first-pass prior-art reference, but should read the granted claims directly rather than relying on the abstract.

The IPC composition shows heavy concentration in core hydrogen production (C01B) and catalysis (B01J) claims, with only 2-3 records each in downstream gas purification (C10K), fuel formulation (C10L) and subsurface/in-well cracking (E21B). That pattern points to open claim space in tying a specific purification or fuel-integration stage to a named pyrolysis reactor architecture, rather than in the reactor or catalyst claims themselves, which are more crowded. A first claim written to bridge pyrolysis output directly into a fuel-cell feed system or a purification train has more room than one written on the reactor mechanism alone.

Patent filing volume alone cannot confirm deployment readiness, but the trend here — a 2024 peak of 11 filings after years of near-zero activity, concentrated in reactor-heating hardware and catalyst composition claims — suggests active engineering-stage development rather than mature, settled technology. The most-cited records are electrically heated substrate assemblies and hybrid microwave-thermal reactors, both hardware-heavy approaches typical of pre-commercial scale-up work. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the true 2025-2026 filing volume is understated in this data and the field may be more active than the raw trend line shows.