THE CATALYST REVIEW - The Catalyst Group

ENVIRONMENTAL
Special Feature
Direct Coal Liquefaction:
Insights from Patent Analytics
Introduction:
With the ever growing demand for petroleum based fuels, scientists and
researchers worldwide are working on alternative transportation fuels. The
liquefaction of coal, both Direct(DCL) and Indirect(ICL) routes had been
commercialized prior to the Second World War in 1930s-40s in Germany and UK.
Following the War, all the DCL plants were shut down due to the low cost and availability of petroleum feedstocks. Extensive research
had been conducted by industry as well as governments through funded projects. During the last five decades, only the ICL route
developed by SASOL in South Africa through the Fischer-Tropsch process (patented in 1925) has been commercially practiced. The
development of direct coal liquefaction has been stimulated in the past whenever there were shortfalls in supply of petroleum/crude
oil and sharp increases in prices. Indeed, interest in DCL has picked up and a first train of a commercial plant is now in operation at
Shenhua, China. However, this DCL plant is the only one of seven total coal-based demonstration plants being developed in Western
China. There are several plants in the planning stages in India and USA, but none are being developed, as yet. This inspired us to
take a critical look into the recent patent filing activities in the DCL area in order to analyze the key patent filers, their associated
technology, trends in technology, etc.
This Special Feature highlights the patent activity of the last decade and the current state-of-the art in direct coal liquefaction
technology. Recent advancements in the technology are identified through an analysis of patents for the period of the last ten years
(1999-June, 2009). These patent analytics based findings are consistent with the above-mentioned commercial activities in the DCL
technology.
Methodology:
A patent search has been conducted on Patweb in Micropat. Patweb covers patents filed in US, Japan, European Union, Germany,
France and Great Britain, for the designated period. The patents which are filed in other countries and have equivalent filings in the
above countries are also considered for the study.
The search was conducted for the period January 1999 to June 2009 using a combination of keywords related to direct coal
liquefaction and International Patent Classification (IPC) codes.
The search results were screened manually to identify relevant patents. The relevant patents thus obtained were analyzed using
several technical parameters. The resultant patent analyses are used to draw different patent maps which in turn are used to identify
filing activity of key players, different schemes of direct coal processes, catalysts, technology trends, research collaborators, etc.
State-of-the-art:
The synonyms of coal used for the patent search on Micropat are anthracite, lignite and peat. The IPC codes used for searching are
all sub-groups used under C10G 1/00. This classification code indicates production of liquid hydrocarbon mixtures from non-melting
solid carbonaceous materials such as coal, wood etc. The total number of relevant patents in this area after manual screening was
found to be 31 over the last 10 years.
The leading companies from patent filing activity (See Figure 1) are Zhaoqing Shunxin Coal Chemical Industries, Agency of Industrial
Science and Technology, Kobe Steel, Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding, Accelergy Corp and Max-Planck Institute. All these
companies have two or more patents globally. The intent of companies is watched based on their unique technologies and the
number of new patents filed. Multiple patents filed across different countries, for a given invention, are treated as one entity/patent.
It is quite clear that the DCL technology is dominated by Chinese and Japanese companies as most of the above companies belong to
these two countries except Accelergy which is US-based and Max Planck, which is based in Germany.
Source: West Virginia University
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The Catalyst Review March 2010