Sweating the Small Stuff: A Market Opportunity

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In 2000, when Patti Glaza first started diving into nanotechnology, clean tech wasn't even a term yet, she recalls. "No one was thinking too much about oil being at $200 per barrel," says the executive director of the Clean Technology and Sustainable Industries Organization, which tracks the development of the nanotechnology sector. " There was still a lot of research going on in areas such as solid-state lighting, but things were still pretty research-led, because there wasn't necessarily a true, breaking need for change."

But as energy has become more of a concern, and the world began worrying about water scarcity, priorities altered. "A couple of years ago, people still questioned that," she says. "They saw oil go up, but said that it was transitional. People don't feel that way any more."

That has led to a large demand for nanotechnology research in the clean tech space. Lux Research, which analyzes emergent technologies, recently finished a survey on venture funding in nanotechnology. It found that $227.2 million was given to energy and environmental development -- almost a third of the $750 million in venture funding currently being pumped into the nanotechnology field.

It's no wonder that there is a lot of interest in this branch of science. Engineering at the nanoscale opens up new opportunities in materials science. For example, surface area can be dramatically increased, explains Andrew Maynard, who served as chief science adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. Working with smaller particles enables manufacturers to make materials more effective by manipulating the surface area. "You can change the reactivity of the surface, making materials far more reactive by making their particles smaller," he says. "That's because with small particles, there are far more atoms at the surface than there are buried inside."

Nanotechnology also allows the creation of new materials such as carbon nano tubes. These are both very light, and stronger than steel. "Composite's are important because of their light weight," says Glaza. "Using nano composite in air planes and cars can help to reduce energy consumption."

Jurron Bradley, senior analyst for nanotechnology at Lux Research, divides clean tech into five different areas: energy, air, water, waste, and sustainability. Nanotechnology has applications in all of these areas, he says. Ceramic-based filters can be used to remove arsenic, lead, and phosphates from water. "Nanostructure ceramic membranes can also be used for desalination," he says. People are working on carbon nano tube gas sensors to monitor the air, along with silver nano particle-enhanced filters.

However, energy is a particularly fruitful area of clean tech for nanotechnology companies. "What floats to the top of the pile is the use of nanotechnologies in battery technology, which is starting to enable far more powerful and efficient batteries," says Maynard.

Battery manufacturer A123 Systems, for example, uses nanoscale technology developed at MIT for its batteries, while researchers at Stanford University have proposed batteries that use silicon nanowires to deliver ten times the capacity of today's cells.

Bradley also predicts work on nanotechnology for fuel-based additives, to help increase the efficiency of diesel, for example. "Companies are working on nano additives to reduce emissions, too," he says.

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