Appeal No. 2000-0316 4
Application No. 08/587,821
not well founded. Accordingly, we reverse this rejection. We agree with the examiner that
the rejection of claims 26, 27, and 82 are well founded. Accordingly, we affirm this
rejection.
The Rejections under § 103(a)
"[T]he examiner bears the initial burden, on review of the prior art or on any other
ground, of presenting a prima facie case of unpatentability." See In re Oetiker, 977 F.2d
1443, 1445, 24 USPQ2d 1443, 1444 (Fed. Cir. 1992). The examiner relies upon a
combination of two references to reject the claimed subject matter and establish a prima
facie case of obviousness. It is the examiner’s position that, “[i]t would therefore have
been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of Appellant’s [sic,
Appellants’] invention, in view of the teaching of Stoesser ‘095, to use lactic and/or
hydroxyacetic acid, of for that matter malic acid (C4), which is also a C1-C6 acid after the
teaching of Kalfayan ‘543, in the amounts such as are now claimed, to produce the
expected results of increasing penetration and reducing formation of aluminum fluoride
precipitates.” See Answer page 7. We disagree as to the examiner’s conclusion, but find
sufficient basis in Kalfayan alone to sustain the rejection of claims 26, 27, and 82.
Kalfayan is directed to a method for acidizing siliceous materials in subterranean
formations penetrated by a well. See column 2, lines 23-25. The well is treated with an
acidizing solution comprising an aqueous solution of an acid component and a second
component comprising a fluorine containing acid or salt. We find that, “[t]he acidizing
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