NEWS OF THE WEEK GOVERNMENT
&
POLICY
ENERGY BILL SET Conference bill boosts ethanol and natural gas, drops MTBE exclusion BIOFUEL Energy bill would dramatically increase ethanol production in the U.S.
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Ν THE VERGE OF BREAKING
a four-year stalemate, Con gress was poised late last week to approve a sweeping over haul of the nation's energy poli cies. Congressional negotiators cleared the way for final passage by agreeing to an $11.5 billion pack age of energy tax credits and incen tives to boost do mestic supplies of oil and natural gas and promote alter native renewable energy sources. "This balanced bill will lower ener
gy prices for consumers, spur our economy, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and take un precedented steps to promote greater energy conservation and efficiency," said House Energy & Commerce Committee Chair man Joe Barton (R-Texas). The bill includes a biofuels pro vision that would almost double the use of ethanol from current levels. A renewable fuels standard requires refiners to blend 4 billion gal of ethanol into gasoline in 2006 and increase that to 75 bil lion gal in 2012. Lawmakers dropped a contro versial House-passed measure that would have shielded manu
MATERIALS
THINNEST CRYSTALS Researchers create crystalline materials at ultimate limit—just one atom thick
T
HE FIRST STABLE CRYSTAL-
line materials confirmed to be but a single atom thick have been prepared and charac terized. The materials —whose compositions range from boron nitride, graphite, and dichalcogenides to complex oxides—exhibit properties that could be useful for a range of advanced materials applications. Andre K. Geim of the Centre for Mesoscience & Nanotechnology at the Univer sity of Manchester, in England, and cowork
ers created the materials by a rub bing technique and successfully vi sualized them by an optical phasecontrast method. Some materials exhibited conductivity and others showed resistivity, among other properties the researchers found (Proc. Natl. Acad Sci USA 2005, 102,10451). The work "demonstrates that single layers can be obtained by mechanically working layered materials—something that many others, including my group, have been searching for," says chem istry professor Richard B. Kaner of the University of California, Los Angeles.
FLAKY Microscopy images (clockwise from top left) show single-layer crystals of NbSe2, MoS2, graphite, and Bi2Sr2CaCu20x produced by Geim and coworkers. 12
C&EN
/ AUGUST
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2005
facturers from lawsuits over wa ter contamination by the gasoline additive methyl tert-butyl ether. Conferees, however, did agree to shift new suits over MTBE con tamination from state court to federal court, setting a higher bar for such claims to proceed. The bill also includes two key measures sought by the chemical industry: a comprehensive inven tory of offshore oil and natural gas reserves, including areas now closed to drilling, and explicit au thority for the federal government to override state and local objec tions to the siting of new lique fied natural gas import terminals. "We are pleased that the con ference listened to our arguments and completed a bill that promis es to stabilize and reduce natural gas prices over time and give man ufacturers a chance to compete in global markets," said American Chemistry Council PresidentJack N.Gerard.—GLENN HESS
In earlier work, chemical peel ing of layered graphite led only to multilayer sheets, and mechanical cleavage of graphite gave materi als with a few layers at best. Geim and coworkers have now extended mechanical cleavage to its ultimate limit, creating singleatom-thick materials. To obtain these "2-D" materials, they re leased flakes from layered mate rials by rubbing them against other surfaces, a method they compare with using chalk on a blackboard. They visualized the crystals by optical microscopy on oxidized silicon wafers and char acterized them by atomic force microscopy and scanning and transmission electron microscopy "A synthetic breakthrough would be needed to scale up the process for industrial appli cations," Kaner says. If that is achieved, many applications could ensue, he adds. "For now, the tech nique should lead to interesting studies in the physics and chem istry of truly 2-D systems."—STU B0RMAN
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