Estimating Artic Oil
Reserves Challenging
By Zachary Coile

Koomey

No one knows how much oil sits beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As Congress prepares to vote on drilling in this area next month, proponents cite estimates as high as 16 billion barrels of oil, while opponents say the refuge could contain less than 3 billion barrels of oil. "They haven't done the really detailed exploratory drilling that would allow you to really understand the geology and get it down to a fine art," he said. "These estimates are based on some relatively modest experimental drilling done decades ago. ... There is still a lot of uncertainty about what is there," said Jonathan Koomey, with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division, who wrote a report about the various estimates of oil reserves in the refuge. Full story.

Retired Model Builder,
Engineer Passes Away

Dougherty

Harold "Hal" Dougherty, a long-time Berkeley Lab engineer, died last Sunday at the age of 84. He started at the Lab in the late 1950s and worked here for over 30 years. An artist by training, Dougherty built precision engineering models. His model of the 88-inch Cyclotron is on display in that building, and a portrait he painted of E.O. Lawrence hangs in the Building 50 lobby. Dougherty's son Jim works as a mechanical technician in the Engineering Division. Go here to read an obituary written by Jim.

Ultrafast X-Ray Program Created; McCurdy Leads

McCurdy

Berkeley Lab's Chemical Sciences Division has announced the formation of a new Ultrafast X-Ray Science Lab, which was recently funded by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The program is a joint experimental and theoretical effort aimed at applying ultrafast laser and accelerator-based light sources in the soft and hard X-ray regimes to problems in chemical dynamics and in atomic and molecular physics. Bill McCurdy, a faculty senior scientist in Chemical Sciences, will become the program's first director. "Experiments performed with the techniques being developed in this new laboratory will challenge the entire body of theoretical methods we now use to understand atomic scale dynamics," says McCurdy, former Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences.

Lab Physicist Gets
Hired by Florida A&M

Jackson

Keith Jackson, a physicist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and associate director of the Center for X-Ray Optics, is Florida-bound. Jackson has been hired as the new vice president for sponsored research at Florida A&M University. Jackson, who joined Berkeley Lab in 1992, is an expert on the deep-etch lithography technique known as LIGA, used for making micromachines. At Florida A&M he will be responsible for attracting research grant money, which reached $60 million in 2004, a 20 percent jump from the previous year. Full story.