A Hydrate Database: Essential to the Technical Community

Dendy Sloan¹ (Task Group Chairman)
and the CODATA Hydrate Database Task Group [F. Kuznetsov (Russia), K. Lal (India), R. Loewner (Germany), J. Ripmeester (Canada), Jean-Jacques Royer (France), B. Tohidi (UK), T. Uchida (Japan), Xiao Yun (China)]

With IT Advice by Tom Smith, Ralf Loewner, Jason Wang and Willa Wang

This paper presents an overview of the rationale for the CODATA internationally-distributed hydrate database, along with it’s history and future, and why it is vital to the hydrate technical committee.  The publication of the Gas Hydrate Markup Language (GHML) will be accomplished in this session as the first step in the database development.  There will be a brief overview of GHML and illustration of a simple example.  The milestones of the next steps (development of a database portal and connections of the various database) will be presented.

The objective of this work 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 (on a semi-logarithmic time scale) to 7,500 hydrate publications in the current decade (2000-2010), or two publications per day, seven days per week, for an overwhelming amount of information to digest.

The CODATA international database is a method for dealing with the knowledge expansion.  The First CODATA Hydrate Project (2000) saw the organization of the task group, chaired by Fedor Kuznetsov, and publicized the first local database, GASHYDAT (2001), developed by Drs. Klerkx and Dimitrov.  The Second CODATA Hydrate Project (2002) held seven world regional meetings to gain worldwide acceptance of the idea among the hydrate community

, and to distribute an international literature citation.  The–Third CODATA Hydrate Project (2004) was devoted to development of a Gas Hydrate Markup Language (GHML), a communication language between the local databases.  The publication of GHML is accomplished at this session.  The subsequent CODATA work will be to establish a database portal, over the period from 2007-2008, with publication of the portal and subsequent database results at the 2008 CODATA meeting.

A simple example of the use of the GHML illustrates it’s utility.

1. esloan@mines.edu, Center for Hydrate Research, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado 80401 , USA.