The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a
district court's grant of dismissal as the pleading stage,
concluding that the district court inappropriately engaged in claim
construction at the pleading stage. Nalco Co. v. Chem-Mod,
LLC, Case No. 17-1038 (Fed. Cir., Feb. 27, 2018)
(O'Malley, J).
Nalco owns a patent directed to a method for removing mercury, a
toxic pollutant, from the flue gas of coal-fired power plants. The
claimed method involves reacting halogens (chlorine or bromine)
with mercury in flue gas in order to form solid mercury-containing
particles that can be filtered from the gas. Because halogens have
corrosive properties, however, they cannot be inserted directly
into the flue gas. Instead, the Nalco patent claims require
injecting into the flue gas a halogen precursor, which will turn
into the desired halogen at the high temperatures in the flue. The
patent describes a preferred embodiment where the halogen precursor
is directly
