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Cow methane: A trump card in the fight against global warming? Story Highlights
Swedish company extracts methane from fermented cow guts

Methane biogas an important renewable energy source



LONDON, England (CNN) -- The butt -- in more ways than one -- of a thousand puerile schoolboy jokes, methane, in the form of natural gas, has for some time now been used to fuel cars and other modes of transport (the Honda Civic GX, which uses natural gas, has been rated the cleanest car on earth).


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Despite producing 25 percent less CO2 than petrol or diesel, however, natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it results in the emission of significant amounts of atmospheric pollution.

As a "biogas", however -- derived from recently living organic matter -- methane is far less environmentally damaging since the CO2 it gives off is immediately reabsorbed by plants and thus adds little to the net sum of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Methane biogas is already being used in projects around the globe to generate electricity -- in China and India, indeed, it has been employed for decades -- and is attracting increasing interest from the car industry as a source of renewable energy.

Now a company in Sweden has developed a novel and environmentally sustainable -- if somewhat gruesome -- method of actually obtaining methane: boiling cow intestines.


The digestive tracts of all living creatures produce methane, a by-product of the action of bacteria breaking down ingested food matter. Because cows have four stomachs, they create considerably more of the gas than any other animal -- 75 percent of the total methane produced by all animals.

To date no viable method has been devised to capture this gas as it erupts from either end of the cow.

Swedish company Svenska Biogas, however, are currently doing the next best thing: taking the bits of cows that would otherwise be discarded during the slaughter process -- stomach and intestines primarily, but also udders, blood and parts of the liver and kidneys -- and extracting the residual methane directly from them.

"Depending on the cow's size, we can get 80-100 kilos of material from each animal," Carl Lilliehook, Managing Director of Svenska Biogas told CNN.


http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/05/cow.methane/index.html

[Okay, let it rip, guys! Just kidding!]