March 2004

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LONDON - The United States was by far the world leader in the number of fuel cell patents issued between 1991 and 2000, but since then, Japan has assumed the lead as the number of new filings skyrocketed, a new survey shows.

The survey was produced by Richard Seymour, a Johnson Matthey specialist in technology forecasting at the company's Technology Centre in Sonning Common, Berkshire, UK. It was published by the Johnson-Matthey Internet publication "Fuel Cell Today," one of several new reports on the status of the fuel cells industry that surfaced last month.

According to Seymour's report, "Fuel Cell Market Survey: Patents, A Rich Vein of Knowledge," the United States generated some 400-plus patents between 1991 and 2000 while Japan produced about 350 patents (there were no exact country numbers in the published version; see bar chart for approximate comparison). Germany was third with roughly

Fuel cell patents by country of origin: 1991-2000 (black), 2001-2003 (grey)

250 patents.

But between 2001 and 2003, Japanese researchers filed just about 1,000 patents while scientists and companies in the United States filed about 900 patents. Germany was still in third place in that period with about 520 patents. Canada came in fourth with fewer than a hundred patents.

The report says that over the last three decades, the total number of patent applications has risen by more than an order of magnitude, from 659 patent applications between 1971 and 1980 to 5,821 between 2001 and 2003. The grand total number of fuel cell patent publications during that period stood at 9,132, with the 2003 data not yet final.

Seymour said merely keeping up with newly published fuel cell patents has become "a major task." In 2000, for example, more than 500 new fuel cell patents were published, but by 2002 "this had increased 4-fold to nearly 2,500," he wrote in his survey.