Dung Power: A New Kind of Battery Farming

Note from the National Enquirer - I wanted this to go on our Climate Action Brisbane blog but that is the "old" blogger and no longer seems to be available (or at the moment atleast). I'll need to get the admin to convert that to the new blogger.

---

Article from whypandas.spaces.live.com blog.

Who’d have guessed it, the future of the planet may soon be assured by a giant pile of cow droppings. An English agricultural college is generating its own electricity by tapping into the vast amounts of methane produced by cattle dung. Students at the Walford and North Shropshire College collect the dried out faeces its herd of cows deposits each day then pump the liqufied poo into a digester which in turn powers a generator. They are now producing all the electricity they need to run a new, environmentally-friendly college building. "Everything that comes out of the back end of an animal goes in,” Adrian Joynt, farm manager of the College’s new £2.7m Harris Centre told the BBC this week. "We actually get enough energy to supply the farm's electricity for a year."

The idea is doubly efficient in environmental terms. The methane cattle produce is a major contributor to global warming. Dairy cows can belch 106 to 132 gallons of methane gas a day, 200 times more than a human. (It’s reckoned that the UK’s 2.2 million cattle account for around 7 per cent of our greenhouse gases although that’s nothing compared to New Zealand, whose 40 million sheep and 10 million cows produce 43 per cent of its emissions.) By processing it this way the amount of methane let loose into the atmosphere is drastically reduced, say Friends of the Earth. All this gives the term battery farming a whole new meaning. Presumably, it also means that at this particular building the s*** is actually powering the fan.