Drs. Tirza van Daalen of TNO Elected as Chair of National Data Repository Group

HOUSTON, TX--(Marketwire - Jan 15, 2013) - The National Data Repository Group has announced that Drs. Tirza van Daalen has been elected Chair of the NDR2014 Steering Committee to oversee the planning and logistics of the next meeting of regulatory agencies charged with managing natural resource data for countries with hydrocarbon reserves.

Tirza serves as Deputy Director of the Geological Survey as part of the research and technology organization, TNO, in the Netherlands. The NDR group is managed by Energistics, the global upstream oil and gas standards consortium. Tirza will take over from Mr. Malcolm Fleming, CEO of CDA Ltd. in London, who oversaw the successful NDR11 meeting in Malaysia last October.

Tirza van Daalen received her MSc in Geology from Utrecht University in 1994. Before joining the Survey in 2009, Tirza worked as a management consultant in the IT industry and as scientific publisher geoscience for Elsevier. She has extensive experience in managing innovative projects, currently including the development of the next-generation Dutch national repository for subsurface data. It will build on DINO, the subsurface database developed and managed by the Survey, which is already unique in terms of data density and coverage, and widely used by public parties for planning and permitting purposes, and by private parties to support their business practices.

NDR meetings attract over 150 delegates from government regulatory agencies, energy companies, oilfield service companies, and software vendors to take part in dedicated workshops, country reports and local cultural events. Recent NDR meetings have been held in Cape Town, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro and Kuala Lumpur. NDR2014 will be hosted by SOCAR and held in Baku, Azerbaijan in the fall of 2014. The overall goal of the meetings is to promote collaboration between governments and the oil and gas industry to more efficiently exchange and manage data generated during exploration, drilling and production operations in the oilfield.

Jerry Hubbard, President and CEO of Energistics and NDR Executive Sponsor, said, "Since 2009 Tirza has well-represented TNO at the NDR meetings sharing updates about their world class natural resource data management system. The Netherlands is a leader in establishing best practices for the more than thirty countries that participate in NDR and her leadership of the Steering Committee is a welcome insurance that our next NDR meeting will be a success."

Energistics is a global, not-for-profit, membership organization that serves as the facilitator, custodian and advocate for the development and adoption of technical open data exchange standards in the upstream oil and gas industry. Uniquely designed to unite upstream industry professionals in a neutral and collaborative facilitation environment, Energistics membership consists of integrated, independent and national oil companies, oilfield service companies, software vendors, system integrators, regulatory agencies and the global standards user community. For more information visit www.energistics.org