RELEASE AT WILL July 20, 1999
BP AMOCO HANDS 40 YEARS OF PALEONTOLOGICAL RESEARCH TO UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
BP Amoco today announced it will hand over 40 years worth of proprietary, paleontological research data to the Energy and Geoscience Institute (EGI) at the University of Utah.
EGI will house and maintain the Paleontological Data System software and database, recently appraised at $11.3 million, making it available for the first time to industrial and academic researchers around the world.
David Work, BP Amoco's Regional President in Houston, will present EGI with the data system at a press briefing Wednesday, July 21, in the University of Utah's Alumni House at 11 a.m.
A product of nearly 40 years of BP Amoco data gathering and research, the paleontological database contains information on the evolutionary origination and extinction of all fossil groups necessary for making geological interpretations relevant to the exploration and development of oil and gas. It contains almost worldwide coverage of evolutionary sequences for these fossils across 500 million years.
The system includes specialized software and associated computer hardware to house and organize the data.
"BP Amoco's contribution will expand the research potential of the University of Utah's faculty, and provide a valuable learning tool for students in both the earth and life sciences," says University of Utah Vice President of Research Richard Koehn.
"We are grateful to have been entrusted with such a vast wealth of geoscientific data."
BP Amoco's David Work cites an ongoing research program at EGI, which is dedicated to developing technologies and software for the analysis of fossil data, as the central reason for selecting the institute.
Housing this database at EGI will help ensure that the data reaches a broad range of industrial and academic researchers, he says. "I am truly excited about the possibilities that such access and its synergies will help foster in terms of knowledge in the energy industry, as well as our knowledge about our planet's climate."
The public release of the database will benefit more than the energy industry, says Raymond Levey, EGI's Deputy Director and research professor at the University of Utah.
"This database, covering more than 100 basins worldwide, will greatly diversify EGI's research to include paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic studies. Such information will help broaden our understanding of global temperature fluctuations through time as defined by changes in the world's biota - important in view of the current public dialogue on issues like global climate change," Levey says.
BP Amoco is an international company involved in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas; refining, marketing, supply and transportation of hydrocarbons; and manufacturing and marketing of petrochemicals and solar power generation.
The Energy and Geoscience Institute at the University of Utah is a non-for-profit research center that has been conducting multidisciplinary, fundamental and applied geologic research around the world for 25 years. EGI projects have been undertaken by geoscientists and engineers in cooperation with universities, government agencies and national energy companies in all seven continents.
A lunch will follow the briefing at noon in the Alumni House.
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Sources:
Raymond Levey, EGI Deputy Director and Research Professor
Phone: (801) 585-3826
E-mail: [email protected]
Richard Koehn, University of Utah Vice President for Research
Phone: (801) 581 7236
Andrew Van Chau, BP Amoco
Phone: (281) 366-3701
E-mail: [email protected]
Writer:
Kirsten Wille, University of Utah News Service
Phone: (801) 581-7975
E-mail: [email protected]
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