I wonder why they have to drill? I once saw a landfill which had vents, pipes with elevated covers, for letting methane escape into the air (so it wouldn't build up beneath the land fill).

Lorna

Our landfills are all closed up...no venting. I would think it would be far better for the environment to keep them closed until the gas was to be extracted (isn't methane supposed to be partially responsible for global warming?), but I know virtually nothing about it.

Apparently they're "drilling" to install pipes and such...maybe the one you saw was already connected to a power company that was using the gas?

They don't actually drill, but install pipes under the capped landfill layers to harvest it. Sort of a matter of semantics, but it's not the same kind of drilling one would do to get oil.

Yes, vents are installed in landfills to allow methane to escape, and it goes into the atmosphere, and yes, it does contribute to global warming. The technology has been slow in coming, because I have read of other attempts to harvest 'garbage gas' and they ended with the operation being discontinued. But, it's a wonderful idea, and I'm sure safer now and will help the atmosphere and also our fuel crunch.

Dumps (landfills) gas can move to things like sewer systems and build up and can literally explode.

The SCJohnson Company (Pledge, Scrubbing Bubbles etc) is currently running a TV ad stating one of their large plants is running totally on methane gas procured from an adjacent 'dump' site. Interesting .....

My bad - "drilling" is the word they used in the article, so that's what I went with. Like I said, I didn't really know much about it (thanks, calliope!). I really hope they get it going...even though I try to keep as much stuff out of the landfill as possible, it's nice to know that *something* useful could eventually come out of it...