Sep. 20--SANDY TWP. -- Slowly brewing below the surface of once rolling land in southeastern Stark County is one of Ohio's newest sources of energy.

About 400 acres of the sprawling American Landfill are perforated with 133 wells that are extracting volatile methane gas that is created by the decomposition of buried household garbage.

As much as 4 million cubic feet of gas -- enough to heat 6,155 households a day -- is cooled and filtered, then pushed west through a nine-mile high-pressure pipeline from outside of Waynesburg west to a Dominion East Ohio facility near East Sparta.

Dominion blends the landfill extract with natural gas -- which is 99 percent methane -- in its large pipeline that runs from the Ohio River to Stark County's Jackson Township before it is sold by Texas-based Toro Energy to heat homes and factories.

American Landfill, where all of Akron's garbage goes, is one of the state's largest landfills and is part of a growing number of such operations that are capturing the landfill gases.

The reasons are primarily twofold: Methane is a source of energy, and it is a big contributor to global warming. Keeping it from escaping is a good thing.

While carbon dioxide is often identified as the No. 1 cause of the greenhouse effect, methane is more than 23 times more powerful at trapping heat in the upper atmosphere. Overall, far less methane is generated than carbon dioxide. It is a shorter-lived problem than carbon dioxide.

Cows are the No. 1 source of methane in the United States, accounting for 23.7 percent of emissions. Landfills are the second, with 22.7 percent, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Because of methane's explosive threat, the federal government had required that methane emissions from larger landfills be flared or burned.

But that's changed, and what's happening to extract landfill gas that is 50 to 55 percent methane at sites like American Landfill is part of a sweeping trend in the last five years.

The EPA said it is aware of 485 landfill gas projects in 44 states that together are collecting 85 billion cubic feet of gas and generating 12 billion kilowatt hours of electricity -- roughly the same as an average U.S. nuclear power plant.

About 40 percent of the country's 1,000 largest landfills, including 11 in Ohio, are collecting and marketing their landfill gases. The number is expected to grow.

One of the largest landfill-gas-to-pipeline facilities in the world is in Southwest Ohio: the Rumpke Sanitary Landfill near Cincinnati.