Cow methane: A trump card in the fight against global warming?
CNN.com, Friday October 5, 2007

LONDON, England (CNN): "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 (Svenska Biogas) has developed a novel and
environmentally sustainable -- if somewhat gruesome -- method of
actually obtaining methane: boiling cow intestines.  They take 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 extract the residual methane directly from
them.

This material is then heated at 70 degrees centigrade for one hour to
boil off the impurities, and put in a digester for one month, where
micro-organisms break it down, producing a mixture of methane and CO2
which is drawn out of the top of the digester.

Having been "upgraded" -- filtered through water to remove as much of
the CO2 as possible -- the resultant methane biogas is then used to fuel
cars, taxis, rubbish trucks and the 70-strong bus-fleet in Linkoping,
the town where Svenska Biogas is based. The boiled-gut biogas is even
being used to power a passenger train.

As well as cow guts, Svenska Biogas is also producing biogas from sewage
and organic plant matter, but it is their pioneering intestinal work
that is attracting the most attention.

"Biogas is definitely the way forward."

So far as methane biogas is concerned, the winds of change would
definitely seem to be blowing."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/05/cow.methane/

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Dr. Ann C. Wilkie                          Tel: (352)392-8699
Soil and Water Science Department          Fax: (352)392-7008
University of Florida-IFAS
P.O. Box 110960                         E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Gainesville, FL 32611-0960
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BioEnergy and Sustainable Technology Society
http://grove.ufl.edu/~bests/

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