The 2020 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Natural Gas Hydrate Systems was held at the Hotel Galvez in Galveston, Texas during February 22-28, 2020. The meeting covered a variety of scientific topics and the content presented was highly rated by the conference and seminar participants.
As described in the GRC website, the 2020 GRC on Natural Gas Hydrate Systems was designed to bring together academic, government, and industry researchers at all career stages, to explore controls on the formation, evolution, and destruction of gas hydrate in a wide range of natural and engineered systems. To further understand the dynamic nonequilibrium processes controlling the occurrence of gas hydrate, this GRC examined the thermodynamic/kinetic and physical/chemical/biological processes controlling the life cycle of gas hydrate systems under a wide range of conditions and analyze the existence and properties of multicomponent and multiphase gas hydrate systems. Key laboratory findings, along with molecular-to-basin scale modeling, and field observations were examined to further our understanding of various gas hydrate systems.
The GRC was well-attended with 125 participants. Scientists from academia represented about 60% of the participants while attendees from various industry and government research organizations accounted for about 40% of the participants. The GRC meeting also attracted a strong mix of early career investigators and senior scientists. Early career investigators accounted for about 45% of all attendees, which reflects positively on the future growth and interest of the international gas hydrate research community.
Regrettably, however, more than 20 scientists from various research institutions and universities in China were unable to the join the GRC in Galveston because of the outbreak of the COVID-19 Coronavirus.
Tim Collett (GRC Chair, 2020); Zach Aman (GRC Vice Chair, 2020; GRC Chair in 2022); Xiaojing Fu (GRS Chair, 2020)