Monitoring the developmental trend and competitive landscape of natural gas hydrate using patent analysis

Abstract Natural gas hydrate (NGH) is an important alternative energy resource to achieve carbon neutral. The developmental trend and competitive landscape of NGH exploitation and production play a crucial role for policymakers in government, managers of enterprises, and science researchers. This paper proposes a new framework to carry out in-depth analysis of NGH by combining patentometrics, technologies evolution and correlation relationships to monitor developmental tends and competitive landscape using patent analysis. The results show that China, the US, and Japan hold a clear advantage using patents analysis. The current technological development in NGH field is more oriented towards extraction technologies, equipment, and processing systems. The co-opetition analysis among countries reveals that the largest international cooperation network is mainly in Europe and the United States, while national partnerships in Asia are mainly in China and Japan. The cooperation among institutions is still low and occurs mainly within universities in China, whereas both the US and Japan have cooperation between enterprises. The competitive landscapes of NGH-related key technologies among countries and institutions are also discussed. This study not only contributes to monitoring the developmental trend and competitive landscape in NGH but also provides policy recommendations for the government and enterprises on strategic management and collaborative innovation.