Why Chinese Power Plants Need Rabbit Food

When I met Jim Rogers in London in 2005, I asked him about investing in water. He told me water is the most valuable commodity on earth. "In the future, they will wage wars over water," he said.

However, Rogers cautioned me, as a speculator, you don't want to own the water itself. When the crisis comes, the government will steal it from you... if you're lucky.

If you're unlucky, the town will lynch you as a greedy speculator. Much better, he said, is to figure out how to transport it, clean it, or filter it. They'll give you a Nobel Prize and all the money you want.

I just spent four days in British Columbia learning about the forestry products industry. This is a complex industry, and I spoke to many different people with many different opinions. But everyone agrees on one thing:
 
British Columbia will suffer a gargantuan forest fire in the very near future.

I have a better suggestion: It's a way to fix the problem. You probably won't win the Nobel Prize from this idea, but it will make you rich. Here's how you do it:

You may have heard about the Mountain Pine Beetle. This little pest is smaller than a grain of rice, yet it has killed more than 50% of the mature pine trees in British Columbia. The way its population is mushrooming, 80% of the pine trees in BC will be dead in five years.
 
This is an unmitigated disaster. BC is the world's forest capital. We're talking about 20 million acres of infested pine forest here. That's double the size of West Virginia. My forest guide told me the beetle kills 10 trees for every tree the loggers chop down.
 
I saw the effects with my own eyes last weekend. "Beetle-kill" trees turn red. I stood at the top of a hill in a logging region of BC and looked down over the forest. It was like someone had spilled rusty red dye on a huge green blanket... and this wasn't even one of the bad areas. 
 
These beetle-kill trees are useless to the logging companies. They won't waste their harvest allowance on dead trees, so they just leave them there. The beetle-kill trees dry out and become perfect fuel for forest fires.
 
As my guide put it, beetle-kill trees are "like billions of matches pointing at the sky." Making the problem worse, if they don't log the forest, they can't clean out the brush on the forest floor, either. This brush is highly flammable.

All it takes is one lightning bolt and we'll have a fire 50 times the size of the California wildfire. The fire will wipe whole Canadian towns off the map.
 
So how do we make money from this situation? Answer: We make wood pellets.
 
Pellets are a form of bio fuel. They're made from sawdust and waste wood. You dry and compress it into these little pellets that look like rabbit food. Power stations in Sweden use them to generate electricity as they don't produce greenhouse gases. Or you can mix them with coal and reduce the CO2 emissions from your power plant by 50%. The Chinese government wants to start buying wood pellets to burn in its coal plants.
 
In cold countries, people use pellets on a retail level. You can buy a ton of them for $200 and heat your house for the whole winter. Even though the pellet furnace costs $4,000, you make your money back in just a couple of years with the money you save on heating oil or gas. In Austria, wood pellets fire two-thirds of all new home heating systems. 
 
At the moment, this industry is tiny, but it's growing fast, especially in Europe. The Europeans are gobbling up wood pellets. With heating oil prices shooting up, it's becoming a serious alternative in Canadian and U.S. homes, too.

Beetle-kill wood is the perfect raw material for making pellets. It's already dry and doesn't need any serious processing. By turning beetle-kill into wood pellets, you also reduce the forest fire risk. It's the perfect solution.

Strong demand, low production costs, and a solution to forest fire risk...

If you're an entrepreneur looking for new business opportunities, you should learn more about wood pellets. You could be a hero... and make a fortune at the same time.

Good investing,

Tom