Aerial picture of the forest, taken Jan. 10, 2006, near Schinveld, Limburg, in Germany.

Germany is one of Europe’s most densely forested countries, and soaring oil and gas prices are leading more households to switch to modern wood-burning heating systems, Germany’s forest owners’ association says.
“Wood grows through God’s hand and no further energy is needed to produce it,“ said Michael Prince zu Salm-Salm, the association’s president.
One-third of Germany is covered with forests despite it being the European Union’s most populous country with the biggest industrial economy., Dw-world.de reported.
Germany is Europe’s leading timber producer, and Salm-Salm said standardized wood pellets can be produced from vast numbers of small or deformed trees which are thinned from forests to allow growth of better quality timber.
Until recently, such trees had no economic value and were left to rot in the woods. But Salm-Salm underlined that rotting wood releases the same amount of CO2--which is stored while a tree grows --as does burning the wood to produce heat.
“This means burning wood is CO2 neutral,“ said Salm-Salm. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, emissions are widely believed to be a cause of climate change.

A Growing Market
Heating systems fuelled by wood pellets have been installed in 70,000 German buildings in recent years. The technology--which is more expensive than oil or gas burners--is subsidized by the German government.
This is still a small number out of the roughly 38 million German households. But the sector’s growth has been explosive, starting with just 800 units nationwide in 1999 and growing to 27,000 units in 2004.
Numerous factories that produce wood pellets have opened in Germany in recent years, including the market leader, German Pellets, based in the eastern Baltic Sea city of Wismar.
Set up in 2005, German Pellets now produces 400,000 tons of wood pellets per year and sells not only to German customers, but also to Denmark and Sweden, according to CEO Peter H. Leibold.
Leibold said new technology for burning pellets produces minimal ash and is as easy to operate as a conventional oil or gas system. He said enough pellets for an entire winter are blown into a basement container and then automatically transported to the burner.
“If we had the political will, Germany could provide 100 per cent of its winter heating from wood,“ Leibold said.

Made at Home
Trees were not the only source for making pellets, he said. Millions of acres of farmland can provide straw, which is routinely ploughed under, for pellets.
Noting recent Russian cut-offs of oil and gas, Leibold said not only was wood a cheaper way to heat, but it is also a safer source.
“This is energy security ... because it’s domestically produced,“ he said.
Salm-Salm noted that with only about 70 percent of annual wood volume growth in German forests being harvested each year, there is great capacity to expand wood burning heating systems.

A Forester’s Dream
Despite growing interest in wood for heating and rising timber prices, there is little danger of depleting forestry resources, said Salm-Salm. German sustainable forestry laws are among the strictest in the world, he stressed.
“You cannot cut down more than grow each year,“ he said.
Sustainable forestry was established in Germany almost 300 years ago by royal Saxony state forester Hans Carl von Carlowitz with his groundbreaking book “Sylvicultura oeconomica.“
“Our foresters are the envy of the world,“ Salm-Salm said.

Tired of exorbitant electricity bills, unreliable power supply and frequent darkness due to load-shedding, Prof. Kibuuka thought of having his house fitted with a solar system.
That was way back in 2005, and a good decision this was, but there were some hurdles--two trees spread their branches across Kibuuka’s roof, creating a shade and he did not want to cut the trees, Allafrica.com reported.
That is when he decided to contact Nicholas Kasekende, a field researcher with Technology Development and Transfer Centre at the Faculty of Technology, Makerere University, to design for him an alternative that would solve his energy woes. Although a teacher by profession, Nicholas Kasekende, beat the odds in the technology field.
When he set out to mould an energy-saving stove, Kasekende says he had no idea what impact it would create. Buying only stainless steel material, Kasekende embarked on the task. He explains that stainless steel does not rust and it gives quality to his clients.
Kasekende makes tanks of varying sizes for cold water storage. Two pipes run from the cold water tank to another tank that accommodates a huge thermal flask. Connected to the second tank are more pipes that lead to a charcoal stove, which could connect to a network of stoves, depending on one’s preference.
Instead of clay, Kasekende fits water pipes in the gap between the inner and the outer metal walls of the stove, through which cold water from the tank passes. As the cold water runs through the pipes, it is heated by the charcoal and another pipe transports the now hot water to the tank, which is fitted with the thermal flask. The system is designed with valves to prevent the reversal of hot water into the cold water pipe.
This innovation, he says, not only provides pre-heated water for cooking, which boils to 85 degrees Celsius or even to the boiling point (100 degrees C), the system also provides water for bathing while one saves on the electricity bills. Kasekende argues that in most developing countries, including Uganda, there is too much reliance on biomass such as firewood and charcoal for fuel, resulting in environmental degradation.
He notes that only 3 percent of Uganda’s population has access to hydro-electric power. The demand for electricity is, however, higher than the supply. He believes that the power distributed is not used effectively. Gadgets such as water heaters, he says, use between 2,500 and 3,000 Watts, which if saved, could light up more than 15 houses in an upcountry district.
He argues that if everyone using water heaters in their homes replaced them with the energy saving stove, they could reduce the electricity bill by a big percentage.
According to a research Kasekende conducted among power consumers, the water heater contributes to 75 percent of the electricity bill. This water heater thermostat, he says, is set at 65, and could burn a house if it went any higher. But whether they have electricity or not, Kasekende notes that almost 95 percent of Ugandans at some point use charcoal for cooking. He claims that his innovation saves energy, but when pressed that it too uses charcoal that leads to environmental degradation, he says: “I know it uses charcoal, but the issue here is how much charcoal is used.“
He stresses that his stove uses less charcoal than the metallic stove and operates at 85 percent efficiency, compared to the three-stone stove that operates at 9 percent efficiency, the metallic stove at 23 percent and the clay stove at 32%, with the rest of the heat energy lost in the atmosphere.
He says he tried to make it 90 percent efficient but realised he was creating a furnace. He also found out that only 30 percent was enough for one to carry out all the cooking. Despite a tough start, Kasekende’s project has become popular with some institutions, commercial businesses and individuals. He says the institutions that have so far embraced his innovation include Gayaza High School and Pelican Hotel in Mbarara, and the latter have reported back to him that they were now saving sh9.5 million annually.

The skies may be dark and the rain may be pouring, but the West Coast’s ever dreary weather hasn’t kept John MacDonald’s mind from fixing on the one ingredient in short supply here: the sun.
Inside a nondescript office building on the outskirts of Vancouver, the man who helped usher Canada into the space age now sits in a small office of 35 workers who, together with some robots so sophisticated he won’t allow pictures of them, are building and testing hundreds of large, blue-tinged panels. These are photovoltaic cells. Hit them with a pulse of light, and in a flash of modern-day alchemy, electricity flows out the other end, Canada.com reported.
But the cells MacDonald’s small factory is producing are unlike any others in the world, built with a technology that holds the potential to do something solar panels have never done before: draw electricity from the sun as cheaply as modern- day power plants generate a current from natural gas or coal.
“We think we’ve got a solution here that finally makes a breakthrough on the price barrier,“ says MacDonald, the co-founder of MDA Associates Ltd., the company that built the Canadarm and is now the country’s leading space business. He retired from MDA in 1998, but the promise of tapping the sun for power was so alluring that, at 70 years old, he recently rejoined the workforce as chairman and chief executive of Canada’s only solar panel-maker, Day4 Energy Inc.
It’s not the first time a new development has been heralded as the revolution that will finally run our fridges and toasters guilt-free on solar power. But for all its promise over the years, the technology has so far been a dismal failure. Canada’s total solar production in 2005 hit a record 16.75 megawatts--mostly in cottages and remote telecommunications devices--but was still just a tiny fraction of the country’s 593.6-million- megawatt total electrical output.
World-wide, solar today contributes just 0.01% of global energy needs, and some analysts say its cost, intermittent nature and geographic dependence mean that, even in a society increasingly obsessed with global warming and energy security, solar will remain a niche technology.
So there is no doubt that what MacDonald is talking about will be difficult, if not impossible, to do. But to the self-described “visionary“ this late-in-life comeback is at least as ambitious--and important--as his bid to put the maple leaf into orbit.
That traditional panel design works relatively well in the light of an average afternoon. But scientists have for years attempted to make concentrators that work like a magnifying glass to collect, for example, the light that shines on 10 square centimetres of earth and focus it onto one square centimetre of silicon, effectively creating 10 suns worth of energy.
The reason: silicon is very expensive, and if you can use less of it to generate the same current, you can save money. But they hit a wall. Under the light of more than one sun the traditional design produced more heat than electricity.
Rubin’s solution: replace the two bus bars with a tight grid of tiny wires precisely adhered onto the cell by robots. That produces about 5% more electricity per hour of sunlight than typical panels.
More important, it “reduces the resistance by a factor of better than 10,“ said MacDonald. In other
words, the Day4 design, which the company has patented and recently began producing, allows electricity to flow off a solar cell as well under 10 suns as it does under one.
That allows the use of concentrators, which can use far less silicon and thereby produce power at what he estimates is half the price of current solar technologies.
“If our numbers, our predictions, are right, in sunny climates we should be able to produce electricity at kilowatt-hour rates that are competitive with fossil fuel,“ said Mr. MacDonald. “If we can do that, this changes things.“
Just how much it will is unclear. Much of the research activity inside the world’s biggest solar panel manufacturers--Sharp, Kyocera, BP Solar and Shell Solar--has focussed on developing alternatives to silicon, which has seen large cost increases that could undermine Day4’s cost savings.
“There’s only so much photo cellgrade silicon available in the world and the cost is driven not by solar cell needs, but by the need for Intel to build more Pentium processors,“ said Jon Hykawy, a technology analyst with Research Capital.
“When you’re competing against someone that can take a small piece of silicon and sell it for thousands of dollars at the end of the day, it’s awfully tough to get the supply you need.“
Concentrators have also proven difficult to build, and materials used in the lenses of existing designs have been hampered by short working cycles. Those concentrators also add expense and a large translucent cover to the panels which some consider ugly.

Scientists looking for new enzymes to boost biofuel production and help America kick its addiction to imported oil say they have found hundreds of prospects in the unlikeliest of places: bug guts.
That’s just one of the places where researchers are looking for ways to produce alternative fuels more efficiently and less expensively. Over the next decade or so, billions of dollars are expected to go into the development of new alternative-fuel technologies--a wave of research initiatives that some compare to World War II’s Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, Msnbc.com reported.
“I think there’s a Manhattan Project going on,“ said Mel Simon, a research at the California Institute of Technology and the San Diego-based biotech company Diversa. “We may not just have noticed it.“
Experts surveyed their progress on alternative-fuel development on February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Unlike, say, commercial nuclear fusion--which is still decades down the road--the researchers said biofuels should make an impact on the energy economy within the next decade.
Nobel laureate Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the need for alternatives to gasoline has become “very pressing“ as the price of oil has risen.
“Currently, transportation fuel is the most valuable form of energy we have,“ Chu said. The economics is such that powering automobiles with gasoline is now four times as expensive as powering them with plug-in electricity, he said.
As part of its initiative to reduce gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next decade, the White House is asking for $179 million over the next year for biofuel research. Private investment is just as substantial: This month, the energy firm BP announced a $500 million, 10-year initiative to support biofuel development.

From Corn to Cellulose
For now, the focus is on producing ethanol from domestic corn for use in gasoline blends. This week, the Agriculture Department projected that the demand for ethanol would lead to a 40 percent increase in the nation’s corn crop by 2016.
However, experts generally agree that corn-based ethanol won’t make much of a dent in fuel demand. Some studies have indicated that the costs of producing such ethanol exceed the value of the fuel produced, and other analysts are concerned that rising corn prices could eventually lead to a food vs. fuel crisis.
That’s why scientists are interested in ways to make the conversion process more efficient, with cellulose rather than corn serving as the raw material for ethanol. Theoretically, wood waste, crop waste (such as cornstalks) and grasses could be turned into fuel--significantly driving down the cost.
In one experiment, Illinois researchers converted miscanthus grass into ethanol at a rate of 2,500 gallons per acre, said Christopher Somerville, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University.
If the technology could be commercialized, Chu said, that yield would be “2.5 times higher than sugar cane,“ which is the crop of choice for Brazil’s booming ethanol industry. Theoretically, cellulose-based ethanol could replace at least one-third of the gasoline used in the United States today, Chu said.
However, the processes for converting cellulose into ethanol are still relatively costly and inefficient. The cell walls of cellulose are constructed in such a way to discourage digestion by insects--or, for that matter, by the equipment used in ethanol distilleries.
That’s where the termite guts come in handy.

Going for the Gut
Researchers such as Caltech’s Simon have been analyzing microbes extracted from the termite’s digestive system, looking for the enzymes that enable the bugs to turn wood cellulose into sugars. So far, hundreds of promising enzymes, including glycohydrolases and cellulases, have been found.
The project, which is being conducted by Diversa and Caltech as well as the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute and Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute, has turned up challenges as well, Simon said.
“The problem with biology is that it’s slow, so it takes an awful lot of termites an awful lot of time to digest a 2-by-4,“ he said. “There are bacteria that make essentially fuel oil, but the process is very inefficient.“
The goal isn’t to enlist the termites or even the bacteria per se, but to unravel the chemical pathways that the microbes use--then adapt those biological processes for more efficient artificial techniques.
“In general, microbes play only one part in the process,“ Simon said. “Nobody can think of a superbug that can eat your table.“

Saudi Arabia has discovered an oil field in the east of the country near the giant Ghawar field.
’Saudi Aramco has discovered a new oil field south east of Ghawar field,’ the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) quoted oil minister Ali Al Naimi as saying. ’On February 11, oil from the Derwaza-1 well ... flowed at a rate of 3,915 bpd associated with 11.9 million cubic feet of gas daily,’ he added.
The well, 70 km (43.5 miles) south of Ghawar, is expected to produce at higher levels, he said. He gave no further details on the size of the find or potential future production, Reuters reported.
Saudi Arabia claims about 260 billion barrels of reserves, nearly a quarter of the world’s total, according to the BP Statistical Review.
Saudi oil officials say it also has gas reserves of 242 trillion cubic feet, making it the world’s fifth largest holder of proven gas reserves.
It faces increasing demand for natural gas from its rapidly growing population and new petrochemical and industrial projects.