Abstract
There are several methods for the gas hydrate production such as spraying water with countercurrent gas flow, stirring water-gas mixture, and flowing water with micro-bubble, etc. These days it has been widely studied for the gas hydrate production method, having low energy consumption and high efficiency. In this paper, patents in the gas hydrate production method were gathered and analyzed. The search range was limited to the open patents of USA, European Union (EP), Japan (JP), and Korea (KR) from 1991 to 2007. Patents were gathered by using keywords searching and filtered by crucial criteria. The trends of the patents were analyzed by the years, countries, companies, and technologies.
