A bus powered by cow poop set a new land speed record, hitting 76.785 mph — 20 mph faster than your typical bus — to become the fastest of its kind in the United Kingdom.
What’s interesting about this story is not the speed achieved — all the engineers did was remove a speed limiter — but the benefit biomethane-powered vehicles could have on the environment: not simply because of emissions released out of cars, but because of the emissions released out of the poop.
Agriculture accounts for around 9 percent of the United States’ total greenhouse gas emissions. Of that, the majority is due to livestock, especially cattle, where methane is released into the atmosphere as the waste stews in fields and such places.
Compared that to the 27 percent transportation contributes to the U.S.’s emissions problem. Methane’s effect is around 20 percent stronger than that of carbon dioxide; if you could remove the cow manure using methane digesters from most California dairies, it would equate to the equivalent of eliminating one million cars from the roads.
And that’s from just one state; there are around 88 million cattle on farms throughout the United States. What’s more, Sustainable Conservation suggests the biogas produced from that methane in California alone could power more than 100,000 vehicles.
As with many green initiatives, when it comes to transportation, the issue is not the product itself — it’s getting the product in a timely, efficient manner; the poo-powered buses operating in the city of Reading, England, (of which there are now an entire fleet’s worth) travel seven miles away from their route to refuel.
