Good News :Reserve projection of the gas-field that doubled the amount of hydrocarbon available in the structure, officials said Saturday. The government has asked Chevron to boost supply from Bibiyana Gas Field.

The acceptance clears the way for digging of new wells in the field and daily additional supply of around 600 million cubic feet of gas within the next two years at a time when the country was desperately searching for new energy source.

The US oil giant Chevron early last year said the Bibiyana gas field in northeastern Bangladesh has a 5.50 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) new recoverable gas, up from the previous projection of 2.40 TCF.

Dallas-based petroleum consulting firm DeGolyer & McNaughton (D&M) made the estimation last year, putting proven reserve of gas at 4.40 Tcf, which is also more than double from the previous estimate.

“We have accepted Chevron’s latest estimates on Bibiyana reserve conducted by the D&M,” Petrobangla chairman Dr Hossain Monsur told the FE Saturday.

He said the state-owned Petrobangla accepted the new estimation after scrutinizing the data and relevant information in line with a provision of the production sharing contract (PSC) signed between Petrobangla and Chevron.

“We have also asked Chevron to expedite development work of the Bibiyana gas-field to extract new gas in a bid to meet the present supply shortfall,” Dr Monsur said.

Dr. Monsur hoped that Chevron would be able to supply additional gas from Bibiyana field after digging new wells within the next two years.

Chevron has informed Petrobangla that it would be able to produce around 1,130 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd) of gas, almost double the current production rate of around 680 mmcfd once it develops more wells, a senior official said.

Bibiyana has a long life that will help Bangladesh meet its energy demand for several decades to come, the company said, adding that new reserve could also go up by another 25 per cent.

Experts have hailed the extra findings at Bibiyana “as the best news for the country’s energy-starved industry” as the new reserve would bring some respites in the current energy crisis.

“It will ensure another four years of gas supply in the country. It is a big sigh of relief for our industrial sector,” said leading energy expert Professor M Tamim of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

The gas field in Bibiyana was discovered in 1999 by the now defunct US energy company Occidental. The company later sold its stakes to another American company, Unocal.

Chevron became its owner after it bought Unocal’s global operations in 2006.

Chevron holds interests in three production sharing contracts in Bangladesh, owning rights to explore gas in more than 10,000 square kilometres (2.47 million acres).

Chevron Bangladesh has a 98 percent interest in Bibiyana, Jalalabad and Moulavi Bazar fields. The company supplies around 250 mmcf of gas a day from the two fields.

Chevron also has a 43 percent interest in Block 7 in southern Bangladesh where the company conducted seismic survey in 2006.

Gas fields in Bangladesh currently produce around 1,980 mmcfd of gas against demand for over 2,200 mmcfd, with Chevron making up around half of the total production.

As the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement
Margaret Wente Source

.In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Gu

Raising Tea Demandin Bangladesh-May overflow export.Bangladesh, known as a tea-exporting country, will turn into a tea-importing one within the next five years due to the fast-growing domestic demand.

?Some 58 million kilograms of tea are produced in the country every year of which 10-12 percent are exported,? Dr Mohammed Ataur Rahman, former Manager of Forestry and Subsidiary Crops of James Finlay (Bangladesh) Limited told UNB.

Referring to the growing habit of taking tea by people, Dr Mohammed Ataur Rahman said Bangladesh used to export 80 percent of its produced tea barely 20 years back when local tea consumption was very low. ?The country will have to import tea if its people start taking more than one cup of tea regularly,? he said.

Dr Mohammed Ataur Rahman, also Director of Education for Sustainability and Centre for Global Environmental Culture (CGEC) of the IUBAT-International University of Business Agriculture and Technology, has a book on tea to his credit.

The book titled ?Improvement of Tea: Environment and Cultural Practices? was published recently.

In his book, he described that Bangladeshi tea is characterized by strong liquor and moderate flavor. ?About seventeen promising well-suited clones are developed by Bangladesh Tea Research Institute and those are being propagated quickly and cultivated in tea estates.?

Besides, the book said, high-yielding clones have also been introduced from India, China and Kenya. In most cases, high-yield, flavor and disease resistance parameters are considered with a hope to increase the yield.

Emphasizing the need for improving the yield, he suggested that natural habitat, climatic condition, soil and associate flora, manpower, transportation, power and fuel should also be considered along with high yielding, disease resistant and good liquored Jat (variety) for sustainable tea cultivation.

Dr Rahman, who obtained his PhD degree on Forestry and Environment, from California, USA, mentioned that indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides can bring quick benefit but at the cost of soil health, natural associate flora and fauna as well as environment. ?Hence, in the long run, the ultimate loss will become many times more than the benefits.?

All options should be explored to increase the yield and production, he said adding that Bangladesh has the materials, market and manpower and it is only the thought to be implied for the improvement of tea with the existing facilities to achieve the maximum yield. ?Therefore, the future of Bangladesh tea depends on the planning of research at appropriate direction.?

Terming tea as the cheapest versatile natural beverage in the world, Dr Rahman mentioned that tea has medicinal and health values and international acceptability.

He said various age groups in all sections of society consume tea and some three billion cups of tea are consumed daily worldwide. ?Tea is business to many; it?s a partner in progress and development and a major item of trade,? he said, adding that it?s also part and parcel of research, art and literature.

In his book, Dr Ataur mentioned that tea, especially green tea, has already been proved as a great therapeutic contains powerful anti-oxidants like catechins, Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), gallotannin and polyphenols, which are beneficial in counteracting a number of fatal diseases like breast and ovarian cancers, tumors and heart diseases.

Dr Ataur said drinking of 8-10 cups of green tea a day is beneficial against coronary heart attacks, obesity, Alzheimer disease, diarrhoea and gastro-intestinal diseases. ?As to the future, researchers hope to find out more about how specific components in tea are used by the body and the mechanism by which they may contribute to disease prevention.?

Describing further the benefits of tea, he said beauticians use tealeaves for hair dyeing. Tea liquor of thick consistency mixed with henna, egg, lime and oil that color the hair dark, bright- the luster comes from tea.

Tea is also a good conditioner for hair after shampoo. It imparts a healthy sheen along with body. For faded and discolored clothes, immersion in tea decoction, it turns old into new.

Best SAG for Bangladesh on record.DHAKA: Hosts Bangladesh swift a six-run victory over Sri Lanka to clinch the Twenty20 Under-21 cricket title for the gold medal in 11th
South Asian Games on Sunday.
Elected to bat, Bangladesh rode on Anamul Haque’s 43 to score 157 for seven in the stipulated 20 overs and then restricted Sri Lanka to 151.

For the hosts, leg-spinner Shabbir Rahman scalped four wickets for 31 runs and played the wrecker-in-chief.

With one wicket remaining, Sri Lanka needed six runs from the last two balls as the match headed to a close finish. But Rahman scalped Naveen Kavikara for his fourth wicket in the penultimate ball of the match to clinch the issue.

Bangladesh got the gold, while Sri Lanka had to settle for the silver in the T20 format that was introduced for the first time in the SAG.

Pakistan won the silver after overcoming Nepal in the bronze medal play-off match.

India did not participate in the cricket competition.

Brief score:
Bangladesh: 157/7 in 20 overs (Anamul Haque 43, MD Mithun 37; Thisara Perera 2/35, Sachith Pathirana 2/22).

Sri Lanka: 151 all out in 19.5 overs (Lahiru Thirimanne 39; Shabbir Rahman 4/31).

Bangladesh won six gold medals on Sunday taking the total number of golds for the hosts of 11th South Asian Games to 14, the highest for the country on record.
The golds came in cricket, taekwondo and karate on the 10th day of the games, reports ATN Bangla.
Sammi Akhter won gold in the women’s under-49 kg category of Taekwondo while the host won gold in karate after Moreom Khatun won her women’s individual under-45kg event.
The hosts grabbed one of the medals in men’s group event, beating Pakistan in the fourth round of the match.
In women’s group event, the host team secured one gold medal while JU Pru secured one in individual event.
In men’s individual event, Mir Mohammad Iftekhar Hossain achieved silver, losing against Sri Lanka.
Bangladesh beat Sri Lanka in the final of SA Games cricket by six runs.

No Politics with religion .Bangladesh is set to reintroduce secular education in the country following a landmark judgement of the Supreme Court that made it illegal to mix religion with politics, the law minister has said.

“The apex court verdict has paved the way for reintroduction of the original spirit of the 1972 constitution…while the government has already prepared a draft for education with the spirit of secularism,” Shafique Ahmed told a convention of teachers here.

He said the Awami League government planned to reintroduce secular education system after being backed by the apex court that ruled illegal a 1979 constitutional amendment that facilitated the flourishing of religion-based politics in the country.

The original constitution of 1972 embodied four fundamental principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism.

Earlier this week, the apex court ruled the Fifth Amendment, which had also legitimised the post 1975 military backed regimes in Bangladesh, as illegal and upheld the original 1972 constitution.

Ahmed said the judgement nullifying the Fifth amendment “has not hurt religion, but established it” despite a “misleading propaganda” by the Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

The Awami League-led grand alliance government welcomed the judgement. However, the BNP said it would make detailed comments only after going through the full text of the verdict. Jamaat-e-Islami, BNP’s key ally in the earlier four-party coalition government, described the judgement “part of a plot to ban Islamic politics”.

China is very important for Bangladesh.Bangladesh-China People’s Friendship Association (BCPFA) held a picnic party Saturday in Savar, 30 km north of capital Dhaka, to celebrate Chinese lunar new year — the Spring Festival.

The venue of the celebration is a resort which was decorated with Chinese red lanterns and Chinese couplets.

Nearly 200 people from BCPFA and Chinese embassy attended the celebration. They were talking about friendship and looking forward to more cooperation in the future.

BCPFA President Anwarul Amin said at the function, “We hold the celebration to share with our Chinese friends the happiness of Spring Festival.”

“Many Chinese friends can’t go home to celebrate Spring Festival with their family members. We want you to treat our association as your home,” he said.

Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Zhang Xianyi said, “Many members of BCPFA devoted their whole life to the friendship cause between the two countries, we feel so grateful.”

Zhang said, “We hope BCPFA will continue to play an active role in enhancing and strengthening the relations between the two peoples.”

BCPFA and Chinese embassy formed teams separately to have football, volleyball competition. Chinese team won volleyball competition and BCPFA won the football competition.

The last program of the celebration was the cultural show performed by some Bangladeshi professional and amateur singers and dancers.

SA Sikdar, secretary general of BCPFA, expressed his warm greetings to all Chinese friends and wished the Chinese community in Bangladesh to have a happy new year.

BCPFA was established in 1986. It is one of the most active organizations in Bangladesh which are friendly to China.