A potent cloud of the planet-warming greenhouse gas methane was spotted by satellite earlier this month near natural gas pipelines in Iowa. A potent cloud of the planet-warming greenhouse gas methane was spotted by satellite earlier this month near natural gas pipelines in Iowa. State and federal regulators said they couldn’t identify the source of the methane, which is the main component of natural gas and has 80 times the global-warming power of carbon dioxide for the first two decades after it’s released into the atmosphere. The plume originated within a kilometer (0.6 miles) of a line operated by Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s Northern Natural Gas Co. and within 10 kilometers of the Alliance Pipeline run by Enbridge Inc., according to an analysis of European Space Agency satellite data by geoanalytics firm Kayrros SAS. Northern Natural Gas ‘did not experience any abnormal operating conditions in the area’ around the time […]