US Patent Issued to Saudi Arabian Oil on July 29 for "Wellbore operations system and method" (British, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,371,967, issued on July 29, was assigned to Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia).

"Wellbore operations system and method" was invented by Graham Hitchcock (Aberdeen, Great Britain) and Arthur Herman Hale (Angleton, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A downhole operation in a wellbore having a lost circulation zone that includes plugging the lost circulation zone with a material that solidifies, and extracting a core from the solidified material to form a bore through the solidified material. The core is extracted with a monolithic coring bit, which retains the core within for removing the core from the wellbore. An example of ...