An adaptive mesh refinement scheme is used for calculation of the flame blowout of a methane diffusion flame. Two chemical mechanisms for C1 chemistry are considered: a four-step reduced mechanism and its starting mechanism of 65 elementary reactions and 18 species. Both chemistry models predicted essentially the same blowout velocity, similar flame structures and reaction rates of major species for locations downstream of the flame leading edge, which is not the case for the locations near the flame leading edge. The computational time required by the starting mechanism was about 3-4x that required by the reduced mechanism for the conditions examined. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.