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domestic requirements without resorting to overcutting of the forests. As a result, production of furniture, toys, paper, and other wood-based products rose rapidly, while domestic timber output fell from 14 million cubic meters in 1951 to a low of about 6.2 million cubic meters in 1966, probably below new growth. Since 1966, however, the output of timber has again increased.

2. Fuels and power (C)

Brown coal, the historical foundation of East German industry and still the source of 75% of its primary energy, is steadily losing ground to crude oil and natural gas as a source of power. Brown coal is used to generate 84% of the electric power produced, but it has been displaced by crude oil as a source of petroleum products and other petrochemicals.

a. Coal and coke

Brown coal mining is centered in the southern part of East Germany, around the cities of Halle, Leipzig, and Cottbus (Figure 11). Open-pit mining technique is used in all brown-coal mining; thus, it is highly mechanized and requires small amounts of labor. Most raw brown coal is consumed by electric powerplants located at or near the mines. A large, but decreasing, percentage of the output is made into briquettes, used principally for household space heating, but also to a limited extent by railroads, electric powerplants, gasification plants, and chemical producers. Although proved reserves at large (about 25 billion tons), the cost of developing them is high and rising sharply, as the regime has discovered in the long-delayed and still-troubled Schwarze Pumpe project in Hoyerswerda. About 4 cubic meters of overburden must now (1971) be removed for each ton of brown coal produced, as contrasted with 2.3 cubic meters in 1955 and about 3 cubic meters as recently as the mid-1960's. According to one East German report, the ratio of overburden to coal output is over six-to-one in more than half the mines. Because of this high cost, the phasing out of marginal mines was being considered in the mid-1960's, and output actually fell in 1965 for the first time since the war. Serious power shortages in 1969 and 1970 forced a reconsideration, however, and the regime expects to maintain output at a 250-million-ton level throughout the 1970's. (Figure 12 shows output of brown coal, other selected fuels, and electric power.)

Hard coal (chiefly bituminous) supplies less than 10% of the total domestic supply of energy. Domestic output (about 1.0 million tons) provides a declining proportion of total hard coal consumption—probably only about 10% in 1970. Consumption is also falling as railroads are shifted to diesel oil and as gasification plants are closed or begin using natural gas. Mining costs are high, and proved reserves are enough for only a few years at the current rate of production. Most hard coal lines are being closed, and their workers are being retrained for other occupations. Imports, mostly from the Silesian fields in Poland (part of Germany before World War II), but also from Czechoslovakia and the U.S.S.R., will likely continue to be the major sources of supply.

One serious fuel problem is the supply of metallurgical coke. Very little of the hard coal mined in East Germany is of coking quality. Coking coal, moreover, is in short supply throughout Eastern Europe, and East Germany has found it difficult to import enough coke or coking goal suitable for use in its iron and steel industry. East Germany has experimented on a large scale with the production of a metallurgical-grade coke from brown coal. In recent years about 1 million tons of this coke have been produced annually, of which about 300,000 to 350,000 tons have, until recently, been consumed in specially constructed blast furnaces at the Calbe steel plant. The Calbe plant was closed in early 1972,

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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110021-0