GOBAR GAS

By METHANE EXPERIMENTS IN INDIA

It's been a wild, exciting ride . . . but our blindly wasteful squandering of the planet's fossil fuels will soon be a thing of the past. In the United States alone (the worst example, perhaps, but not really unusual among "modern" nations), every man, woman and child consumes an average of three gallons of oil each day. That's well over two hundred billion gallons a year.

If we continue burning off petroleum at only this rate—which isn't very likely since population is climbing and the big oil companies remain chained to "sell-more-tomorrow" economics—-experts predict the world will run out of refineable oil within (are you ready for this?) 30 years.

So where does that leave us? Well, number one, we obviously must get serious about populatio n control and per-capita consumption of power and, number two, if we don't want to see brownouts and rationing of the power we do use . . . we'd better start looking around for ecologically-sound alternative sources of energy.

And there are alternatives. One potent reservoir that's hardly been tapped is methane gas.

Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of methane—sometimes called "swamp" or bio-gas—are generated every year by the decomposition of organic material. It's a near-twin of the natural gas that big utility companies pump out of the ground and which so many of us use for heating our homes and for cooking. Instead of being harnessed like natural gas, however, methane has traditionally been considered as merely a dangerous nuisance that should be gotten rid of as fast as possible. Only recently have a few thoughtful men begun to regard methane as a potentially revolutionary source of controllable energy.