Appeal No. 1998-3189
Application No. 08/763,352
In the present case, we determine that the examiner has
not carried his burden of establishing a prima facie case of
obviousness. As correctly pointed out by appellants at pages
9-25 of the Brief, the applied prior art taken as whole would
not have led one of ordinary skill in the art to the catalyst
regeneration step described in Torrence and/or the hydrogen
sulfide decomposition technique described in Mellor to improve
Maddox’s process for removing hydrogen sulfide from natural
gas. The examiner has not sufficiently explained why one of
ordinary skill in the art would have selected sulfuric acid
used in the catalyst regeneration step described in Torrence
and/or the hydrogen sulfide decomposition technique described
in Mellor over the highly effective purification medium
already employed in Maddox. This is especially true in this
situation since the examiner has presented no evidence
regarding the effect of sulfuric acid on a natural gas stream
or its impurities, e.g., water and carbon dioxide. From our
perspective, to combine the prior art references as proposed
by the examiner would be to destroy the invention on which
Maddox is based. Ex parte Hartmann, 186 USPQ 366, 367 (Bd.
7
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007