
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 22, 1994                   TAG: 9407200030
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

SCIENTISTS HOPE TO CLEAR THE AIR ON COW-GAS ISSUE

COWS EAT a lot of weeds and underbrush, the bovine equivalent of beer and chili dogs. And can they help it if they have four stomachs?

The Environmental Protection Agency this year has given Utah State University a $500,000 grant for another three-year study on bovine flatulence.

This is because cows produce 35 million metric tons of greenhouse gas per year, and the Clinton administration has decreed that the nation has to do its bit to fight global warming by cutting annual methane emissions by 10 percent by the end of the century. That means you, Bossy.

Crude guffaws over the first study of this kind, a $300,000 job completed last year, shattered a wholesome image carefully nurtured over millennia, and replaced it with a slapstick vision of slobbish cud-chewers gorging themselves on alfalfa and passing gas by the metric ton.

It's a bad rap.

``We're talking about ruminant methane,'' said Paul Stolpman, director of the EPA's Office of Atmospheric Programs. And ruminant methane, he said, does not necessarily mean what you think it means.

Stolpman pointed out that ``flatulence,'' as defined in the dictionary, is the act of ``producing gases in the stomach or intestines.'' The word says nothing about the mode of escape: ``They can come out of any orifice,'' Stolpman said.

But which one? According to Utah State professor Kenneth Olson, the animal nutritionist who leads the new study, food fermentation begins in the first of the cow's four stomachs, called the rumen, and cows get rid of more than 90 percent of their methane by exhaling it. Cows do pass gas at either end, he acknowledged, but these emissions are an insignificant sideshow to the main event.

Cows account for about 20 percent of the noncommercial methane produced each year, so the government is trying to reduce it.

Olson said that even though his research is not expected to produce a methane-free cow any time soon, the government does not yet plan to head in the other direction. Yes, Olson acknowledged, bovine methane is usable natural gas, but harvesting presents a problem. He suggested filling a large biosphere with cows, feeding them underbrush and weeds, filtering the air and using the methane for home heating.

How's that for heartburn?

by CNB