Landfills for the Environment?

So I heard from a representative of Curtis Engine about utilizing landfills to run their methane powered engines this past week. They make one of only a handful of engines world wide that can be powered by methane.

The basics of the landfill background are:
-Large landfills, especially those with lots of organic materials in them and with moist conditions, give off tons of cubic feet of 50% CO2 and 50% methane (as well as <1% other trace elements) per year.
-In the past this would have merely leaked out into the atmosphere, or possibly leaked out underground, occasionally into people's basements, and rarely causing explosions.
-In more recent years, the excess methane has been flared off, which produces CO2 and H2O, because it is 20 times as detrimental a greenhouse gas as CO2.
-This is wasted energy potential.

Many up and coming entrepreneurs, and some who are already well established, are realizing the potential for some of the newer and larger landfills to be converted into small, methane-fueled power plants, with the assistance of these special engines. This will still convert methane into the less harmful CO2, but it will do so in a beneficial way that will take pressure off of using fossil fuels and natural gases as a source of power.

One of the most interesting things noted in the presentation and discussion was that this way we are only using carbon from today, not stable, stored carbon from millions of years ago and adding it in addition to the current circulating supply. This goes along similar lines as using corn oil as a source of fuel, because the corn that will be used will sequester some of the carbon in the atmosphere. It will all be in a nice little cycle. Though I am not necessarily for corn oil as a source of fuel, because I think those lands could be put to use at making food instead, I am very much for the use of methane from landfills. This gas will be present either way, and using it as a fuel does not waste it, and it controls its release better so that it will not escape through underground crevasses and cause unnecessary damage.

This is also a nice opportunity to create more jobs for today's economy. Technicians would be needed round the clock to monitor the engines and generators. This would take an otherwise generally unwanted area and turn it into an economically profitable venture.