Is it true or not that methane gas is a Greenhouse gas stronger than CO2?
 

If its not as strong a greenhouse gas then why not stop drilling CNG (which is about the same thing) so much, and just tap into landfill/sewage treatment/animal methane gas?
I read somewhere that methane gas is a greenhouse gas 23 times as heat trapping as CO2, but yet CNG produces 21% less greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline.

you got one thing right methane is every where, I saw a video of a young girl catching some bubbles from a pond and filling a two litre bottle with them she stuck a straw in the cap and lit it !! I heard its more explosive than Natural gas though

I met a guy who had a business generating electricity from New Yorks landfills, pretty wealthy guy , so must be doing something right , all do able just tricky the epa sometimes doesnt even agree with itself.

Methane IS the main component of natural gas (which usually also includes some heavier gases like propane and butane).

You won't get the necessary volumes by tapping into the alternative NG sources, but it is already being done.
In some countries in Europe, you can buy "bio"gas, which is methane sourced from landfills, sewage, cattle farms, ...

That's when methane gets into the atmosphere, i.e. without burning it.

There's plenty of that happening naturally - at sea, in thawing permafrost, ...
Drilling for gas lets some more of it escape - either as raw methane, of it gets burned off (using flares) when it can't viably be transported to shore.

That's when you burn it.

We cant enough land fill gas to replace all the gas from wells.

It's true that methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas, but unlike CO2, it doesn't have a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. Release a molecule of methane today, and in a few years it will combine with oxygen: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O. That's an exothermic reaction, meaning you get energy out. A molecule of CO2, stays around for thousands to millions of years, since the reactions to convert it to C + O2 (or various carbohydrates, etc) are all endothermic, meaning you have to put energy in via e.g. photosynthesis.

Your right about it being more of a green house gas than CO2. That is why many or all refrigerants are controlled. R12 refrigerant was banned because it broke down the ozone layer in the atmosphere, but the newer refrigerants are bad for global warming if released directly int o the atmosphere. The od thing about this is that refrigerants are controlled, but there is nothing stopping you from emptying your propane tank int o the atmosphere. The effects are just as bad. Propane makes a good refrigerant, but because of it's ability to burn, it's banned from use in that way because of the treat of explosion if it leaks.

Yes and no. As with methane, the effects might be bad, but propane degrades in fairly short order. Fluorocarbon refrigerants, like CO2, take a lot longer to degrade, so they accumulate.

If the components of natural gas didn't degrade, we'd have a lot of methane &c in the atmosphere, just from normal biological processes. In fact, there was some news this past year about detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere as being a possible sign of life.

Methane and nitrous oxide are both very "strong" greenhouse gasses. And they both break down over a few years - but part of the resulting gasses after that include carbon dioxide.

Nitrous oxide comes from water soluble nitrogen fertilizers (that we make from natural gas i.e. methane) that washes out of the soil with the first water/rain.

So, if methane is released directly into the air, or if it burned (combined with oxygen) - either way, we get more greenhouse gasses. If we get the methane from landfills or from sewage or farm waste, then that carbon came very recently from the air, and so it does not *add* to the carbon dioxide level in the air, over time.

It's only when the carbon comes from underground, from where it had been sequestered for millions and millions of years that it adds to the level of carbon dioxide in the air, that it becomes a problem.

Of course not, but it's a viable source (one of many), and it'd be a shame to let it escape into the air.

Methane pockets that leak into the atmosphere have always existed.
This process has been happening for ages though - long before we started burning dino oil.

Animals have always been pumping out methane - and they were numerous back in the days.

NASA "uses" the fact that methane is a byproduct of animal life as a "MARKER / INDICATOR...of life..." when searching for life on other worlds.

Thanks for the useful info.

I'm also favorable for biomethane as an alternative to fossil CNG. It's a relatively low-cost solution and can reduce significantly the dependence on oil from politically-unstable lands.

Humans have released many orders of magnitude more carbon back into the atmosphere than ever leaked out on it's own, and the natural balance was holding things quite steadily for 650,000 years. That is until we started burning fossil fuels.

Animal digestion gas doesn't change the balance of carbon to the air - it all came from the air relatively shortly before. Do you know what creature is the source for the greatest amount of methane? Termites. But they eat wood etc. that contains carbon that the tree/plant pulled from the air to begin with, so again, it doesn't change the long term balance of carbon dioxide in the air.