I have to admit, while i was probably likely to write up a story on biological production of methane, i.e. Farts, I never imagined it would be for my sustainable energy blog.  If you’ve been paying attention to global warming over the last 10 to 20 years, you’ve probably heard:

1. Methane gas in the atmosphere is 20 times more damaging  greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide.
2. Cattle, other livestock and humans, release a huge percentage of the methane free in the atmosphere.  This gas is produced by digestion and released, intermittently, when the said mammal “breaks wind”.

Now, it’s certainly tough to be all serious about this sort of object, yet it’s a serious global warming issue.  How do we keep this methane out of the atmosphere? Strangely enough, for those familiar with Carbon Dioxide offsets, the best way to dispose of the methane in a greenhouse friendly way is to BURN it.  Yep, burn it and generate CO₂ , is apparently a net gain for the atmosphere, when it comes to global warming.  This “practical solution” ignores an even better idea, either capture and sequester the methane or even better, stop the production.

Now before people accuse me of being a vegetarian or start thinking that i’m planning on outlawing meat, i am not.  The point of this story is some research in Australia to stop the production of methane, during digestion, by livestock.  Yes, stop these animals for producing methane and “releasing” it into the atmosphere.  What makes these researchers think they can change mammals to running “methane” free?  Some sort of genetically engineered life form?

The answer is maybe, but for those who don’t know this, it will rock your world, vis a vis the biological portion.  It turns out that Australia’s most prominent symbol, the kangaroo does not produce methane when it digests it’s food!  Further, the kangaroo digests it’s vegetarian diet more effectively than say Cows, pulling 25% more water out of the plant material, very important in mainly arid/desert country such as Oz.  So scientists are trying to implant bacteria from the kangaroo’s digestive track into cows and sheep, to see if this kangaroo trait can be introduced into traditional livestock animals.

The Kangaroo Story in Aussie Paper

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Global Warming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.