Methane

American scientists said Wednesday that they had found a tantalizing new energy source in vast stores of methane locked beneath the ocean floor. They report in Nature that they found a reservoir of methane in the form of a solid gas hydrate equivalent to about 15 billion tons of carbon at Blake Ridge in the Western Atlantic. Underneath that, to their surprise, they found as much or more methane in the form of gas bubbles amid the sediment.

As children played in the schoolyard at Hawaiian Avenue Elementary last week, three somber-faced safety inspectors wandered from one classroom bungalow to the next, poking a long metal rod into vents at the bases of the one-story structures. They also drilled holes in the schoolyard blacktop, through three feet of dirt, using the probing rod to suck air from the underlying soil. The workers studied the needle on a hand-held meter. It didn't budge.

Glendale officials Friday reignited three fiery torches that burn off methane gas leaking from a covered-over landfill, reversing a decision to extinguish the flames more than 24 hours earlier that briefly raised fears that the gas could gather in nearby areas and explode. Glendale officials put out the flares at about 7 p.m.

Methane, a major chemical linked to global warming, is leaking in massive amounts in several Eastern European cities, much of it thought to be from antiquated natural gas systems, according to researchers from UC Irvine. Since methane accounts for up to 25% of the gases causing the so-called greenhouse effect, plugging leaky pipes in Eastern bloc nations could make an important dent in efforts to forestall global warming, the UCI scientists reported today in the scientific journal Nature.

More than 100 residents of an apartment complex at the Playa Vista development near Marina del Rey were evacuated early Sunday after a methane alarm sounded. Los Angeles Fire Department officials said it was a false alarm, and Playa Vista representatives said they suspect that a janitorial crew inadvertently tripped a methane detector. The evacuation rattled tenants at the project, which is built atop an unknown amount of methane.

Mining coal is much like working in a natural gas well. The same things that produce coal and oil -- dead organic material, heat and pressure -- also produce natural gas, whose primary constituent is methane. The gas is trapped in a coal seam or petroleum reservoir by pressure and water, only to be released when workers drill into the strata. "It's a tremendous nuisance," said mining engineer Christopher J. Bise of West Virginia University. "It's colorless, odorless and tasteless, but highly flammable."

A company hired by Huntington Beach to monitor potentially dangerous methane gas under a park and a library repeatedly faked the data to make it appear the gas levels were declining, prosecutors charged Monday. GeoScience Analytical Inc. of Simi Valley, and its president Fleet E. Rust, face criminal charges of submitting false field test data to government officials. If convicted, Rust could be sentenced to two years in prison and $50,000 in fines.

Central California is home to nearly 1.6 million dairy cows and their manure -- up to 192 million pounds per day. It's a mountain of waste and a potential environmental hazard. But for dairyman John Fiscalini, the dung on his farm is renewable gold: He's converting it into electricity. At his farm outside Modesto, a torrent of water washes across the barn's concrete floor several times a day, flushing tons of manure away from his herd of fuzzy-faced Holsteins and into nearby tanks.

Some cows become steaks. Others star in TV commercials. Lucy, a 5-year-old Black Angus, has been recruited for an experiment to fight global warming. Lucy is a resident of the beef pen at Washington State University's Pullman campus, grazing away the spring days, chewing her cud and burping into a tube that directs her breath into a canister slung around her neck. She is one of several cows helping chemist Halvor Westberg and his colleagues analyze greenhouse gas emissions.

Ventura County government will earn royalties from methane gas products sold by the operators of Simi Valley Landfill under an agreement approved Tuesday. Waste Management Inc. agreed to share up to 3% of gross revenues earned through the sale of methane-generated electricity to Southern California Edison. Landfills create methane gases, which can be captured and used for energy.