NETL’s expertise using science-based models, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), data analytics, and high-performance computing to develop new, clean, efficient and affordable energy technologies was on full display in September at the 10th New York Scientific Data Summit.

Hosted by Brookhaven National Laboratory and co-organized by NETL, the event revealed insights on data-driven discovery and innovation in science and industry. The forum connected diverse participants and fostered productive discussions on topics ranging from data management to AI and ML in science.

Science-based Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Institute (SAMI) Technical Director and NETL Senior Fellow Kelly Rose, Ph.D., served on the steering committee and gave a talk titled, “Data Aggregation and Integration for Energy Infrastructure Modeling.”

Her presentation highlighted NETL’s data management platform, Energy Data eXchange (EDX®), that provides researchers more time to perform research by solving four major data curation problems: enterprise-level curation, data governance, scalability and discoverability.

“As AI impacts more aspects of data processing and curation, creating a scalable system has become challenging,” Rose said. “NETL is meeting this challenge by unlocking the potential of AI through the EDX migration to the multi-cloud. The cloud-based solution offers both data curation and future cloud computing capabilities to accelerate innovation for carbon management, hydrogen, critical minerals and materials and many more clean energy transition research areas.”

She demonstrated how the platform meets the needs of NETL stakeholders, scientists, and professionals who are at work meeting the U.S. Department of Energy’s mission to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions. 

NETL’s Paige Morkner addressed the data curation capabilities of EDX in her presentation titled, “Curating Carbon Storage Data for Reuse: Enabling Research and Modeling from Earth’s Surface to Subsurface.”

Her presentation showed how enterprise-level curation supports the use and reuse of data to solve today’s energy research challenges. She highlighted workflows and practices that have resulted in the curation of over 15 terabytes (TB) of public data, and more than 105,000 downloads of carbon storage resources on EDX. Roughly 250,000 documents can fit on a 1TB drive. 

“Years of data curation efforts resulted in workflows, best practices, metadata and symbology standards that have been used in the development of multiple tools and datasets benefitting both the carbon storage program, as well as the recent Bipartisan Infrastructure Law work,” Morkner said.

Rose and Morkner also explained other NETL tools including:

• The Smart CO₂ Transport-Route Planning tool that supports the strategic planning of safe and sustainable routes for the transportation of CO₂ from where it is captured to where it can be stored underground or converted into other products.
• Advanced Infrastructure Integrity Modeling (AIIM) —an award-winning tool that uses AI/ML to evaluate energy infrastructure integrity. This capability can lead to effective cost savings and improved operational measures for environmental safety.

Rose is a geo-data science researcher with more than 20 years of experience developing data-driven methods and advanced computing solutions to address energy and environmental challenges at NETL.

Morkner leads and collaborates with teams of researchers at NETL to develop data curation strategies for multi-source, multiscale datasets in support of onshore carbon transport and storage and methane emissions mitigation research.

Rose and Morkner were among a prestigious list of experts who spoke at the summit. A few of the other organizations that sent speakers included Argonne, Idaho, Oak Ridge, and Brookhaven National Laboratories; Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Yale, Ohio State, Columbia, New York and Princeton Universities; the University of Southern California; the Joint Genome Institute; the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; Microsoft Research; Amazon Web Services; Fulcrum Neuroscience; and Digital Twin Consortium.

Additional information about the New York Scientific Data Summit is available here.

NETL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that drives innovation and delivers solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future. By using its world-class talent and research facilities, NETL is ensuring affordable, abundant and reliable energy that drives a robust economy and national security, while developing technologies to manage carbon across the full life cycle, enabling environmental sustainability for all Americans.