Energy and Environmental Applications Program: Overview (1998)

For our society to thrive, we must prudently develop our public and private energy and natural resources. To make the best decisions and avoid costly mistakes it is best for those making decisions to do so within an information rich environment based on good scientific principles and data. Decisions on natural resources and economic development can especially benefit from the increases in the kinds and volume of scientific information -- if the information can be easily found, analyzed and understood, and is timely and compatible with other data.

The Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Program (EETAP) will develop the information and scientific tools to understand, quantify and predict the environmental consequences of energy related activities. It undertakes relevant science that will lead to improvements in the quality of environments and enhanced oil and gas exploration and production activities.

The explosive increase of information, computer networks, and travelers of the Internet's information highway all point to a world vastly different from anything we have ever experienced -- a world rich in information but often chaotic and confusing. Energy demand in the U.S. will remain at high levels, particularly oil and gas from the Gulf of Mexico region. Information is the key to its success.

EETAP seeks to improve the flow of information about energy development, other natural resources, and disasters in order to:

  1. Improve development of energy and natural resources in an environmentally sustainable fashion;
  2. improve the information base and its accessibility for better development and management of land and natural resources;
  3. develop methods and science required for information rich decision-making and translate into information used in the development of all natural resources;
  4. reduce the environmental risks of development and transportation of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico region; and
  5. improve the response to disasters (hurricanes, flood, oil spills, etc.) and speed recovery.


Emerging technologies can bring needed information to the private and public sectors. These technologies, which link, communicate, store, analyze, and display natural resource information, are continually developing and rapidly changing. For example, broad geographic data bases can be developed and quality controlled that include human infrastructure (wells, pipelines, canals, roads, urban and industrial areas), and natural resources. These can be used to advise natural resource managers of risks to and changes in natural resources (habitat quality, increases in invasive and pest species, surface water availability, water quantity and quality, diseases, sediment discharges, etc ). EETAP will develop the scientific tools and information to understand, quantify and predict the environmental risks and consequences of oil and gas development and transportation.

The Regional Application Center (RAC) sponsored by NASA is an important component of the EETAP. This Regional Application Center will couple the University of Southwestern Louisiana, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, the National Wetlands Research Center, and other agencies and institutions to address new information technology solutions, including intelligent computer data base management and telecommunications. The Regional Application Center will be one of four nationwide to provide access to real time data from new NASA satellites. The RAC serves as a testing ground for NASA-developed software and will be the foundation of an electronic energy and environmental information hub providing data and analysis tools to a wide variety of users. Catastrophes such as major oil and chemical spills also need reliable information on a real time basis. In this context, EETAP will also play a needed role in disaster management.

The Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Program will become a real and virtual hub of energy and environmental information and information analysis capabilities, ranging from electronic searching of the world's data, cartography, and experts to data bases of natural resource information, geographic information systems, decision support technologies, and conflict resolution expertise. Armed with an array of information, products and services from information and technology specialists, private sector and government clients alike can use the EETAP to better develop and manage the Nation's energy and natural resources in the south. This Department of Energy funded program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana utilizes the expertise and resources of the Department of the Interior's National Wetlands Research Center, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration's Regional Application Center, the National Marine Fisheries Service Estuarine Habitats and Coastal Fisheries Research Center, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, and the oil and gas industry, to deal with modern energy development and natural resource challenges.

 

Current EETAP Component Project Summaries
Information Systems Technology for Energy & Environmental Applications Dr. Vijay Raghavan and Ms. Gaye Farris,
Project Directors
This component project, USL and the National Wetlands Research Center build on their scientific expertise and facilities to develop state-of-the-art digital information management and analysis technologies to support energy and environmental issues. The project centers around the development of a comprehensive Energy and Environmental Information Resources (EE-IR) Center, which will focus on information resources of interest to the Gulf Coast region. In addition to the information resources maintained locally, clients will also be provided access to information resources created by organizations such as the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). The EE-IR Center will benefit users by capturing and organizing the knowledge and experience of environmental research librarians, by creating metadata to locate appropriate information sources, and by providing software tools and infrastructure to transparently search the databases. The development of the EE-IR Center complements and supports the activities of the NASA/Regional Application Center (NASA/RAC) recently established at USL. The funding provided for this project will, in part, enhance the computing resources of the RAC. Furthermore, the research and development carried out relative to the EE-IR Center will further extend the capabilities of the NASA/RAC to search, distribute and add value to NASA data sets. To support the development activities, basic and applied research will be carried out in areas such as multimedia indexing and retrieval, database mining, media technology, parallel and distributed computing, and data visualization.

A bibliography of publications produced by the EE-IR Center is available.


 Modern Baselines for Assessment of Global and Regional Impacts from Production, Transport and Use Fossil Fuels: Characterization of Endemized Assemblages the Northern Gulf of Mexico at Risk from Warming,Hypoxia and Habitat Pertubation Dr. Darryl Felder
Project Director
This component project develops a genetic and morphological information database essential to informed management for a future that will include sustained regional energy activity under effects of at least moderate global change. It will study model groups of plants and animals with molecular and other methodologies in an attempt to characterize the degree of uniqueness in northern Gulf of Mexico biota. The project will provide technical reference resources, specimen vouchers and the technical instrumentation for competent biodiversity assessment, while also devising and evaluating standard methodological protocols required for such an effort.

 

A Low Power Design Paradigm for Ultra LargeScale Integration (ULSI) Systems Dr. Magdy Bayoumi
Project Director
This component project will develop a Design Paradigm for lower power Ultra Large Scale Integration (ULSI) systems that are composed of several million transistors. It is applicable for both Single Chip and Multi-Chip Module (MCM) technologies. The proposed methodology will provide models, theories, and algorithms for system-level partitioning and clock distribution. These two goals constitute the main kernel of the proposed high-level synthesis system of ULSI architectures.

 

A Minimal-Effort Time-Lapsed 3-D Seismic Process Dr. Louis Houston and Dr. Gary Kinsland,
Project Directors
Time-lapsed 3-D seismic surveying uses repetitive 3-D surveys with some minimum time separation to detect oil/gas reservoir changes due to petroleum production. This component project seeks to develop minimal effort techniques to be used over smaller reservoirs and improve the ability to develop those resources.

 

The Regional Application Center Vacant
USL has been designated by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as one of four sites in the United States for a Regional Application Center (RAC). The RAC receives transmissions from satellites that cover the Southern United States and the Gulf of Mexico region. Using a state-of-the-art earth station with advanced computer hardware and software, it directly collects and processes the massive amount of data transmitted by current and future satellites in real time. The processed data can then be widely disseminated to promote development of new applications of satellite data by government agencies, university research scientists, and industry. The availability of processed satellite data is expected to have a major impact on research and economic development, especially those data that pertain to energy and environmental applications, in the region.