Post Carbon: Obama administration reimposes offshore oil drilling ban - Washington Post

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Wednesday afternoon that the Obama administration will not allow offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as part of the next five-year drilling plan, reversing two key policy changes President Obama announced in late March.

"We are adjusting our strategy in areas where there are no active leases," Salazar told reporters in a phone call, adding that the administration has decided "not expand to new areas at this time" and instead "focus and expand our critical resources on areas that are currently active" when it comes to oil and gas drilling.

In March--less than a month before the BP oil spill--Obama and Salazar said they would open up the eastern Gulf and parts of the Atlantic, including off the coast of Virginia, to offshore oil and gas exploration. On both of those new areas, the administration said it would start scoping to see if oil and gas drilling would be suitable. The eastern Gulf remains closed to drilling under a congressional moratorium, but the White House indicated it would press to lift the moratorium if necessary.

Wednesday's announcement is sure to please environmentalists while angering oil and gas companies as well as some lawmakers from both parties who have pressed for continued offshore energy exploration in the wake of massive Gulf of Mexico spill.

Salazar said while the administration will still allow offshore drilling in both the central and western Gulf of Mexico and in the Arctic, it will delay lease sales planned for March and August in the gulf to conduct additional environmental reviews, and will prepare a new environmental assessment of Shell's proposal to drill in Alaska's Beaufort Sea next year. Shell officials warned that the additional review could jeopardize its ability to explore for oil and gas in the Arctic in 2011.

Marilyn Heiman, director of offshore energy reform for the Pew Environment Group, welcomed the announcement but questioned why the administration is still leaving open the possibility of leasing areas in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas between 2012 and 2017.

"Much more needs to be done to ensure there is adequate spill response capability that is proven to work in Arctic conditions before drilling can be considered," she said.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who has consistently pushed to restrict drilling in the eastern gulf, also welcomed the news. Salazar called the senator Wednesday morning, according to Nelson spokesman Dan McLaughlin, but the two men did not speak yet because Nelson is chairing a hearing.

"Drilling off Florida's Gulf coast is banned at least until 2022, under a 2006 law passed by Senator Nelson," McLaughlin said. "The senator is pleased the White House has decided rightly to keep the area off-limits. He hopes Florida's next governor and the Legislature similarly will commit to protecting the state's tourism economy and unique environment."

Activists such as Margie Alt, executive director of Environment America, also praised the administration's plan, saying, "Today, anyone who loves our beaches, who fishes in the ocean or who depends on a healthy coastal economy can thank the Obama administration for protecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the west coast of Florida from oil drilling. The BP disaster earlier this year was a tragic reminder that drilling is a dirty and dangerous business. The only way to truly keep our coasts and ocean ecosystems safe is to keep them rig free."

But the move could spark a backlash from business interests as well from both many congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats such as Sen. Manry Landrieu, who argue that curbing offshore energy exploration could exacerbate the nation's economic woes.

Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy, said in a statement, "The Administration is sending a message to America's oil and gas industry: take your capital, technology, and jobs somewhere else."

Rep. Doc Hastings (Wash.), the top Republican on the House Resources Committee, issued a statement Wednesday afternoon accusing the administration of "taking the wrong approach in responding to the BP spill and creating energy and energy jobs in this country. The answer isn't to give up and say, 'America can't figure it out, we'll rely on other countries to produce our energy.' The answer is to find out what went wrong and make effective, timely reforms to ensure that U.S. offshore drilling is the safest in the world."

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3 share Nobel Prize in chemistry for finding new ways to bond carbon atoms - Washington Post

An American and two Japanese scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for finding new ways to bond carbon atoms together, methods now widely used to make medicines and in agriculture and electronics.

Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were honored for their development in the 1960s and '70s of one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling.

It lets chemists join carbon atoms together, a key step in the process of building complex molecules. Their methods are used worldwide in commercial production of pharmaceuticals, including potential cancer drugs, and molecules used in the electronics industry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

The method invented by Heck is used in herbicide production, the academy said.

Heck, 79, a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, now lives in the Philippines. Negishi, 75, is a chemistry professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and Suzuki, 80, is a retired professor from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

The techniques developed by the three scientists have been used to artificially produce cancer-killing substances first found in marine sponges, the academy said in its citation. It is not yet clear whether the artificial substances will turn out to be useful drugs.

The techniques are also being used to create new antibiotics that work on resistant bacteria and a number of commercially available drugs, including the anti-inflammatory naproxen, prize committee member Claes Gustafsson said.

"There have been calculations that no less than 25 percent of all chemical reactions in the pharmaceutical industry are actually based on these methods," he said.

Palladium-catalyzed cross coupling is also used by the electronics industry in the coating of electronic circuits and as a tool to develop thinner computer screens in the future, said prize committee member Jan Erling Backvall.

Heck started experimenting with using palladium as a catalyst while working for an American chemical company in Delaware in the 1960s. In 1977, Negishi developed a variant of the method, and two years later, Suzuki developed another.

Heck was the only American among the Nobel science winners this year. There had been at least two U.S. scientists among the medicine, physics and chemistry laureates since 1991, when there was none.

- Associated Press

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Nobel Prize honors super-strong, super-thin carbon - BusinessWeek

By MALCOLM RITTER and KARL RITTER

NEW YORK

It is the thinnest and strongest material known to mankind -- no thicker than a single atom and 100 times tougher than steel. Could graphene be the next plastic? Maybe so, says one of two scientists who won a Nobel Prize on Tuesday for isolating and studying it.

Faster computers, lighter airplanes, transparent touch screens -- the list of potential uses runs on. Some scientists say we can't even imagine what kinds of products might be possible with the substance, which hides in ordinary pencil lead and first was extracted using a piece of Scotch tape.

Two Russian-born researchers shared the physics Nobel for their groundbreaking experiments with graphene, which is a sheet of carbon atoms joined together in a pattern that resembles chicken wire.

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in England used Scotch tape to rip off flakes of graphene from a chunk of graphite, the stuff of pencil leads. That achievement, reported just six years ago, opened the door to studying what scientists say should be a versatile building block for electronics and strong materials.

"It has all the potential to change your life in the same way that plastics did," Geim, 51, a Dutch citizen, told The Associated Press. "It is really exciting."

Michael Strano, a chemist at MIT, said trying to predict its uses would be "folly ... We can't even imagine the uses we're going to find."

But he and others have some ideas. Graphene's electrical properties mean it might make for faster transistors, key components of electronic circuits, and so lead to better computers, the Nobel committee says. As a single layer of carbon atoms it's tiny, which could pay off in more powerful cell phones, several scientists said.

And since it's practically transparent, it could lead to see-through touch screens and maybe solar cells, the committee says. It might also pay off for big TV screens.

Its tremendous strength could produce new composite materials that are super-strong and lightweight, for use in building airplanes, cars and satellites, the committee says.

So why aren't pencil leads super strong, if they contain graphene? Breaking a lead generally involves a shearing off between graphene sheets rather than breaking the sheets themselves, explained James Tour of Rice University. And while a person can tear up a single sheet of graphene, it's still stronger than a one-atom-thick sheet of anything else.

"There's nothing stronger," Tour said.

Graphene has not made its mark in ordinary consumer products yet, although some prototype electronic display screens and composite materials have been created, Strano said.

Lots of scientists are studying it, in some cases to learn about basic physics, Strano said. Researchers are still trying to find a practical way to make large quantities of pure graphene, something more amenable to large-scale use than the Scotch-tape approach, he said.

"The field is still very new," he said, and the awarding of the $1.5 million prize to Geim and Novoselov is "absolutely marvelous."

Joseph Stroscio, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he had thought it would take a few more years of scientific appraisal before graphene would win a Nobel. But its potential applications and the brand-new behavior it presents for basic physics have drawn strong interest since the 2004 breakthrough, and the prize is well-deserved, he said.

It might take five or 10 years before graphene shows up in products like cell phones, he said.

Novoselov, 36, is the youngest Nobel winner since 1973 of a prize that normally goes to scientists with decades of experience. He holds both British and Russian citizenship.

Paolo Radaelli, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, marveled at the simple methods the winners used.

"In this age of complexity, with machines like the super collider, they managed to get the Nobel using Scotch tape," Radaelli said.

The 2010 Nobel Prize announcements began Monday with the medicine award going to British researcher Robert Edwards, 85, for in vitro fertilization. Unlike the physics prize, which came just six years after the graphene breakthrough, the medicine award came more than 30 years after the birth of the first test tube baby. The prize committee ignores the provision in Alfred Nobel's will that the award honor discoveries made the preceding year because it takes time to measure the benefits.

The chemistry prize will be announced Wednesday, followed by literature on Thursday, the peace prize on Friday and economics on Monday, Oct. 11.

The awards were created by Nobel, a Swedish industrialist, and first given in 1901. The prizes are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

There have been no Americans among this year's Nobel laureates so far, but that could change Wednesday with chemistry, a prize that has been dominated by U.S. scientists. Only once in the past decade, in 2007, did the prize not include a U.S. citizen.

Harvard researchers George Whitesides and Charles Lieber frequently figure in Nobel speculation. So do Scottish chemist Sir Fraser Stoddart at Northwestern University and Japan's Sumio Iijima, who discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991.

Thomson Reuters, which analyzes high-impact scientific papers to make predictions, suggested Stanford University biochemistry professor Patrick Brown for his work on DNA microarrays. It said Japan's Susumu Kitagawa and American Omar Yaghi could also share the award for designing porous metal-organic frameworks.

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Karl Ritter reported from Stockholm. Associated Press writers Malin Rising and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm and Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.

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Online:

http://www.nobelprize.org

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