This a touchy subject in New Zealand where they are suggesting bringing in a tax for methane “exhausts”. When I was there a couple of years ago their newspapers were calling it the ‘fart tax’. Cows and other ruminant animals “emit” large amounts of Methane. What about equating a number of trees planted per cow or other ruminant? Not the same greenhouse gas but an overall balancing perhaps.

There is technology to clean up methane from some sources — A demonstration project begun this week at an abandoned West Virginia (USA) coal mine will test a technology to convert methane into clean energy. The US EPA and Department of Energy have partnered with industry to trial the system, which destroys methane in ventilation air by heating the gas to more than 900 degrees C and converting it to CO2 and water. The heat can be used directly in mining operations, such as coal drying, or to generate electricity.

Technorati Tags: Methane, ISO 14001, New Zealand, US EPA, CO2

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 2:41 am and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. 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.