Using patents to support prospective life cycle assessment: opportunities and limitations

Purpose: Some prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) studies obtain information from patents, albeit without exploiting their full potential. The objective of this study is to show which data and information can be retrieved from patents to inform practitioners when conducting a prospective LCA of an emerging technology. Methods: This study suggests which patent analysis techniques can be used to support which prospective LCA challenges, by reviewing patent analysis techniques and classifying the information that can be extracted from them according to those required to meet prospective LCA challenges. To illustrate the usefulness of the suggested techniques, a case study on solid oxide fuel cells is presented. Results and discussion: The analyses of patent geographical jurisdiction, publication trend, maintenance costs, citations, and infringement can be used to define geographical and temporal scope and to select technology alternatives. Function(s), quantitative data, and information about scale-up and technological trends can be extracted from patents and used to predict function(s) of the new technology, fill the prospective life cycle inventory (pLCI), and choose existing LCI datasets. However, limitations of patents that could prevent their use in prospective LCA are as follows: (i) some information can be intentionally distorted to hinder competitors; (ii) patent bibliometric indicators to evaluate the future success of patented technology on the market can be overstated by patents of well-known owners that receive more citations and infringements albeit with no greater chance of future development; (iii) patenting to block competitors rather than to develop a new technology; (iv) the lack of significance of certain data due to the too low technology readiness level (TRL) of the prototype from which they were obtained; (v) a less than rigorous data examination process; and (vi) patents are not very helpful to quantify emissions. Conclusions: We show how patents can be used to support prospective LCA when the assessment cannot count on the support of technology experts. We highlight how it is necessary to pay more attention, compared to the current practice in prospective LCA, to the peculiarities of patent prose and the legal and strategic use of patents by companies.