Potential Geothermal Energy Data Standards Project

Note: This proposal has no official status and may change or be withdrawn.

OASIS is exploring the feasibility of launching a project to identify requirements and create common data structures for geothermal energy information standards. All interested parties are invited to comment on this discussion, which potentially will be used to determine the scope and direction for a new Technical Committee at OASIS.

Premise: Exploitation of geothermal resources requires operational and informational resources that are broadly similar to petroleum exploration: 1) robust three-dimensional location coordinates; 2) a long life cycle for data, as resources pass through exploration, extraction/installation, estimation and production; and 3) heterogeneous metadata for the relevant geology, geophysics, tectonics, hydrology, biology and ecologic attributes of sites.

The wide range of data is occasioned by the need to estimate development and production costs at various potential geothermal sites, where a long lead time and significant upfront investment is required. However, at this early stage, access and control of geothermal resource information – both reservoir estimation of naturalresources, and the capabilities of extraction/generation equipment may be significantly less privatized than the data marketplace for petroleum deposits. In the geothermal sector, much of the data and some significant public policy imperatives still vest in government agencies and the public sector.

As a result, widespread data sharing and calculations based on interoperable compatible data are needed, so harmonized data structures will be of immediate value.

As utilities and regulators contemplate the integration of geothermal into national supply grids, this body of data also will come under pressure to be interoperable, and upwardly compatible, with a second body of work: the various systems and taxonomies that will be used by advanced prediction, control and metrology practices to operate those power grids.

Outcomes: A project to identify requirements and create common data structures for geothermal energy information standards likely would need to consider the following tasks:

-- Core set of methods for 3D geoposition statements that: - tie to readily available statistics; - explicitly handle volumetrics; - are upwardly compatible with future definitive systems under development (like EU's INSPIRE); and - tie out to human-readable / common-vernacular location data, if possible.

-- Assembled taxonomy for scientific data statements about various physical matters of hydrology, tectonics, geology, etc., which should: - re-use or be referenceable to established SI measures; and - be compatible with semantic operations, e.g., capable of distinguishing between primary absolute data and derived/interpreted data.

-- Robust extensible metadata to accommodate future extended needs (e.g., source or generation-method identification more fine-grained than might be requested today).

-- Open-ended ability to append additional data in various unanticipated formats, such as image and chart data.

-- Data and message format that permits enveloping of the foregoing into forms compatible with widespread asynchronous sharing, messaging, database calls, and data exchange transactions among heterogeneoussystems.

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Please comment on the above points. Do you agree there is a need to identify geothermal energy information standards? Do the above lists accurately reflect the scope of work that's needed? Are there other issues that should be considered before launching this project?