This exploratory research focused on using patent data analysis to develop a technology roadmap for innovation on microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) in the oil and gas pipelines to advance the current understanding of this phenomenon through the LENS patents database.
Evolution in the number of patent documents (applications and grants) from 1990 to 2020 demonstrated that MIC in the oil and gas pipeline had been an area of continuous growth throughout the last 15 years. Since 2007 a remarkable increase in the trends of patent records started, reaching its highest value in 2013. In the retrieved set (1,891 records) the 63.4% corresponded to patent applications, and 36% granted patents. The legal status of patents indicated that 38.9% were related to active patents, 29.1% to pending patents, and 32% to discontinued records. Private corporations dominate as the most productive and influential sector in patent production. The top ten applicants on patent records were private companies, including Ecolab USA Inc (86), Dow Global Technologies (59), Du Pont (59), and from academia only Harvard College (41). The same trend was identified in the top ten owners in the sample, including Ecolab USA Inc (81), Dow Global Technologies LLC (51), Du Pont (41), and from academia just Harvard (24). The USA (1190), WIPO (451), and European patents (235) were the three leading jurisdictions in the data set.
A recent review provided an overview of current microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) research. It established that despite extensive study and numerous publications, fundamental questions relating to MIC remain unanswered and stress the lack of information associated with MIC recognition, prediction, and mitigation (Little et al., 2020). On the other hand, bibliometric analysis on the MIC of engineering systems conducted a knowledge gap analysis to focus research efforts and to develop a roadmap for MIC research (Hashemi et al., 2018). One of the main conclusions of this bibliometric analysis was that despite the nature of MIC research is multidisciplinary, it is siloed between two main subject areas: material/corrosion sciences and microbiology/environmental sciences. Informetric was performed to analyze corrosion of petrochemical equipment (PE), this study used visualization software (CiteSpace and VOS viewer) to explore the related literature on corrosion research from 2000 to 2002. Three primary knowledge bases of corrosion studies of PE were captured. First, hotspots and research frontiers of corrosion studies of PE were visually explored, and the themes of corrosion studies of PE were roughly grouped into three core paths (Lang et al., 2021).
