An Emirati man stands at the oil terminal of Fujairah during the inauguration ceremony of a dock for supertankers on September 21, 2016.

OPEC and the United Arab Emirates’ ministry of energy will next week launch the first phase of a new global oil and gas database project aiming to develop an easy-to-use tool to analyse energy information and allow for more transparency.

The Oil and Gas Big Data Project “will consist of a set of high standard analytic tools, employing data-driven approaches, optimization and statistical analysis techniques,” OPEC said in a statement on Tuesday.

It will be linked to publicly available oil market databases and will cross-compare information between different countries, flows and products, and will be expanded in the future, it said. Accurate and timely information on oil supply, demand and inventories is key for the oil market to analyze future trends.

A lack of reliable data on production and consumption of crude oil and refined fuels in many emerging markets is often an obstacle to do so and could contribute to oil price volatility.

Joint initiative

Producers and consumers in the late 1990s stepped up a bid to improve transparency through such efforts as the Joint Organizations data Initiative (JODI), an attempt to cast light on the world’s notoriously opaque global oil markets.

Riyadh-based JODI data (www.jodidata.org) is often used by industry analysts and media as it contains key data of interest to the market, including consumption in China and output figures from the world’s top exporter Saudi Arabia.

The new Big Data Project, which will be unveiled in Abu Dhabi on April 19-20, “has the potential to fill the existing data analytics gap, placing available oil and gas data at the fingertips of market stakeholders,” OPEC said.