LEFT-HANDED ALIENS
By Jean Thilmany
Researchers may one day be able to find extraterrestrial life via an instrument on a telescope, according to scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who have built a prototype.
The device for detecting life elsewhere in the universe won’t spot aliens directly. Rather, an instrument in space would pick up a telltale sign that life may have influenced a landscape: a preponderance of molecules that have a certain chirality, or what the researchers describe as handedness.
A right-handed molecule has the same composition as its left-handed cousin, but their chemical behaviors differ, said Thom Germer, physicist at NIST, headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md. Because many substances critical to life favor a particular handedness, Germer and his colleagues think chirality might reveal life’s presence. They’ve built a device they hope will one day be able to detect life from a great distance away.
“You don’t want to limit yourself to looking for specific materials like oxygen that Earth creatures use, because that makes assumptions about what life is,” Germer said. “But amino acids, sugars, DNA—each of these substances is either right- or left-handed in every living thing.”
Many molecules not associated with life exhibit handedness as well. But when organisms reproduce, their offspring possess chiral molecules that have the same handedness as those in their parents’ bodies. As life spreads, the team theorizes, the landscape will eventually have a large amount of molecules that favor one handedness.
“If the surface had just a collection of random chiral molecules, half would go left, half right,” Germer said. “But life’s self-assembly means they all would go one way. It’s hard to imagine a planet’s surface exhibiting handedness without the presence of self assembly, which is an essential component of life.”
Because chiral molecules reflect light in a way that indicates their handedness, the research team has built a device to shine light on plant leaves and bacteria, to detect the polarized reflections from the organisms’ chlorophyll from a short distance away. The device detected chirality from both sources.
The team intends to improve its detector so it can look at pond surfaces and then at landscapes on Earth. Provided the team continues to get good results, Germer said, members will propose that it be built into a large telescope or mounted on a space probe.
“We need to be sure we get a signal from our own planet before we can look at others,” he said. “But what’s neat about the concept is that it’s sensitive to something that comes from the process behind organic self-assembly, but not necessarily life as we know it.”
OFFSHORE CONFERENCES IN RIO AND GALVESTON
By John Varrasi
The ASME International Petroleum Technology Institute has entered a partnership with Quest Offshore Resources involving two technical conferences that focus on offshore energy exploration and production.
The first, Subsea Rio 2009, will be held Sept. 15 through 17 at the Sheraton Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The second is DeepGulf 2009, which will run Dec. 1 through 3 at the Moody Gardens Hotel and Resort in Galveston, Texas. ASME-IPTI is developing much of the technical content for both conferences.
Now in its second year, Subsea Rio 2009 is targeted at executives and engineers in the global petroleum business, operations managers involved in project planning and scheduling, and young professionals seeking insights into developments in the industry.
Subsea Rio 2009 will include sessions on deepwater wells, subsea boosting and pumping, standardization, and floating production scalability. Chevron, Shell, and Statoil are among the companies that will participate in the event.
DeepGulf 2009 focuses on oil and gas development in ultra-deepwater basins. The three-day information exchange will include sessions on drilling, floating structures, pipelines and risers, and subsea production equipment. Shell International is the host of the conference.
Quest Offshore Resources is a research and consulting firm concentrating on the offshore oil and gas industry.
ENERGY FUTURES
By Jeffrey Winters
Making predictions is hard, begins the quip by Niels Bohr (or Yogi Berra), especially about the future. But when you’re in the business of analyzing and projecting energy trends over a 20-year timeline, there’s nothing more difficult than making predictions in a time where every old assumption is being called into question.
So the International Energy Outlook 2009, released by the Energy Information Administration at the end of May, should be forgiven if, in a few years’ time, its projections of energy use and carbon emissions don’t come to pass. Many of the factors that will shape the energy industry in the next two decades are still being determined.
 Forecast World Oil Prices in the International Energy Outlook
One force that is beginning to be acknowledged by the EIA is a limit on petroleum production. Unlike previous editions of the annual forecast, which assumed that world oil supply would grow to meet the projected demand, conventional petroleum production is now expected to remain nearly flat. As a consequence, oil prices that had been predicted to return to and stay in the $50 to $70 per barrel range (adjusted for inflation) are now seen to rebound quickly to more than $100 a barrel and remain there indefinitely.
Electricity from nuclear power plants is expected to increase steadily in every region except Europe, but the projected increase in coal consumption by 2030 has been reduced since last year’s forecast. Most of that reduction, however, is a result of a projection for a slower increase in total energy consumption.
And for those concerned about the level of carbon dioxide emissions, the forecast provides little comfort. The projected emission levels for 2030—more than 40 billion metric tons a year of CO2—would, according to most climate scientists, lead to severe changes in the climate. For the United States and other nations to avoid those carbon emissions, they would have to make drastic changes to their energy mix. That’s not something the EIA, or anyone else, can predict with any confidence.
GREEN INVESTMENTS PLUMMET
By Alan S. Brown
The global recession has apparently taken a toll on green technology investments. According to a survey by business consultant Ernst & Young, venture funding for “cleantech” companies dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2009, to 23 deals worth $237 million. That is down sharply from the first quarter of 2008, when investors closed 41 deals worth $715 million.
The slowdown came after several years of solid growth. In 2002, the year Ernst & Young began tracking green technologies, it reported 38 deals worth $242 million. This rose to 106 deals worth $1.5 billion in 2006, 180 deals worth $2.9 billion in 2007, and 188 deals worth $4.7 billion in 2008. Last year’s total might have gone higher, but cleantech funding plummeted 50 percent in the three months after September’s stock market slide and the onset of the credit crunch.
While cleantech companies had trouble raising capital, they were able to tap new government initiatives and corporate commitments, said Joseph A. Muscat, who heads Ernst & Young’s cleantech business in the Americas. Many corporations are buying cleantech products, such as hybrid vehicles. The U.S. American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) will finance more than $100 billion for cleantech spending, loan guarantees, and incentives.
“While the timing of the receipt of government funding is uncertain, we expect that loan guarantees and other government financing structures, as well as corporate adoption rates of clean technologies, will be early indicators of an upward investment cycle,” Muscat said.
Despite the downturn, the quarter produced some winners. Funding for energy storage companies rose to $114 million from $50 million one year ago. Lithium ion battery manufacturer A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass., raised $69 million. Fuel cell companies raised $45 million, led by a $28 million funding for Lilliputian Systems of Wilmington, Mass.
Investment in energy generation fell 73 percent from one year ago, to $56 million. Solar companies accounted for $48 million of the total. Most of that came from a $40 million investment in Pasadena, Calif., based eSolar, a developer of solar thermal power plants. The investors were NRG Energy, an energy generation company, and Acme Group, an Indian infrastructure company.
Overall, venture capitalists sent 57 percent of their funds to companies already shipping products, up from 43 percent one year ago. One notable exception was a $10 million funding for Oasys Water, a Cambridge, Mass., developer of desalination and water treatment products.
BRIEFLY NOTED
The U.S. Army has approved a long-lead acquisition—in effect an initial advance payment—not to exceed $30 million for Raytheon Co.’s Surface Launched Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (SLAMRAAM) program. The program is developing a tailorable air defense system that can defeat cruise missile threats, unmanned aerial systems, and a wide range of non-ballistic threats. /// Lattice Technology of San Francisco, which develops digital manufacturing applications using the XVL format, has released XVL Studio 8.1, an upgrade to its core 3-D digital manufacturing application. /// U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana has ruled that Duke Energy must shut down units 2, 3, and 5 at the company’s West Terre Haute Wabash River Station no later than Sept. 30, 2009. Duke had proposed that the three units, which together generate 265 MW, or 39 percent of the plant’s capacity, operate until 2012. The company will not have to install additional emissions reduction equipment on the remaining units, 4 and 6. /// Aras Corp. of Andover, Mass., which produces open-source product lifecycle management software, has upgraded its Aras Innovator suite of PLM software solutions. /// The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has signed a memorandum of understanding to mark the acceptance of the American National Standards Institute as an accreditation body to participate in the EPA WaterSense Program. The WaterSense program helps consumers to identify products that conserve water while maintaining high performance levels. |
