International Council for Science : Committee on Data for Science and Technology

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C O D A T A

Data on Natural Gas Hydrates

Approved by the CODATA 23^rd General Assembly in Montréal 2002
Renewal approved by the CODATA General Assembly, Berlin 2004
Renewal approved by the CODATA 25th General Assembly, Beijing 2006
Renewal approved by the CODATA 26th General Assembly, Kyiv 2008

Objective:

The objective of this task group is to develop an internationally distributed database for Natural Gas Hydrates, which represent an energy resource equal to twice that of the total of all the other hydrocarbon resources. The knowledge base in this area is exploding, and an efficient way is needed to deal with the data overload. For example consider the number of refereed publications in the area as an indication of the data expansion:

• from 1900-1910 there were 2 refereed hydrate publications

• from 1990-2000 there were 3010 refereed hydrate publications

this extrapolates to 7,500 hydrate publications in the current decade (2000-2010) – or more than 2 per day, 7 days a week,

The CODATA international database is a method for dealing with the knowledge expansion

Membership:

USA – D. Sloan, esloan@mines.edu (Task Group Chair)
Canada – J. Ripmeester, John.Ripmeester@nrc.ca
China – Jianhui Li, lijh@sdb.cnic.cn
China Weihua Wang, whwang@sdb.cnic.cn
France – Jean-Jacques Royer, Jean-Jacques.Royer@ensg.inpl-nancy.fr
India – K. Lal, klal@csnpl.ren.nic.in, klal@mail.nplindia.ernet.in
Japan – T. Uchida, t-uchida@eng.hokudai.ac.jp
Russia – F. Kuznetsov, fk@che.nsk.su
US – Kenneth Kroenlein, kenneth.kroenlein@nist.gov 

Recent Activities:

1. Published four articles about the Gas Hydrate Markup Language (GHML) in the CODATA Data Science Journal
2. Began and supported USA Hydrate Database effort at NIST ( Boulder)
3. CODATA Hydrate Database Executive Committee (Sloan, Chairman, CSM; Smith, Queens College NYC; W. Wang, CNIC Beijing; R. Loewner, GFZ-Potsdan) met in Boulder, Colorado May 2-4 to discuss GHML with NIST.
4. NIST began melding GHML with ThermoML during April2007 – July 2008
5. Held CODATA Hydrate Database Committee meeting in Vancouver BC (October 25-27, and July 6,2008 to report on Portal development to CODATA Hydrate Database Committee
6. Secured funding for webservice development t at Computer National Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The first version will be available at end of 2008 calendar year.
7. Began coordination with IODP hydrate database, to determine communication between the two at CNIC and IODP.

It should be emphasized that hundreds of volunteer hours have gone into this project in order to bring it to the current stage. The CODATA funding input into this project has been leveraged by several orders of magnitude. This donation of effort is not likely to happen again in this area, if the work is not brought to fruition.

It is vital to recognize this level of effort by bringing the work to fruition in the next stage of the CODATA project. Thanks are due the previous (2000-2004) Task Group Chairman, Dr. Fedor Kuznetsov, to Drs. Klerkx and Dimitrov for generating the initial, on-line hydrate database GASHYDAT, to the Russian Academy of Sciences for their support, to the Department of Science and Technology Government of India for their support, to the current donation of two IT workers at the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to the GeoForschungsZentrum-Potsdam, and to the USA Department of Energy for their support of this work.

By providing reliable data on gas hydrate natural system, the objectives of the Gas Hydrates TG can help to reach the recommendations by the Scientific and Technological Community presented by ISCU at the recent United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-14).