Natural Gas Explained: Past, Present, and Future
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One of the most common and versatile forms of energy in the world is natural gas. Natural gas is used for cooking, heating, electrical production, and even powering vehicles. Entire economies are dependent upon its consumption, and others are dependent upon its production. As such, it has become one of the most important commodities in the world. Learn more about natural gas, what it is, where it comes from, and how it's used on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. ♪

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Natural gas is primarily composed of methane, CH4, which typically makes up 70-90% of its volume. It may also contain smaller amounts of ethane, propane, and butane, which are hydrocarbons used in various industrial and residential applications. Additionally, natural gas includes non-hydrocarbon gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide, and trace amounts of water vapor and even helium.

Before being distributed for commercial use, raw natural gas undergoes processing to remove impurities, moisture, and unwanted gases, ensuring that it meets safety and efficiency standards. This is designed to increase its methane content to make it cleaner burning. Methane is odorless, colorless, and tasteless in its pure form. However, because methane is the primary component of natural gas, and leaks can be hazardous, gas companies add a strong-smelling chemical called mercaptan to it.

Mercaftan has a distinctive rotten egg or sulfur-like odor, making it easy to detect gas leaks for safety reasons. This added odor helps prevent accidents by alerting people to the presence of escaping gas before it reaches dangerous concentrations. When methane burns in the presence of oxygen, its combustion results in carbon dioxide, water, and heat. When burned properly, methane produces a blue flame, indicating high efficiency with minimal soot and carbon monoxide.

However, if oxygen is limited, incomplete combustion can occur leading to a yellow or orange flame and the production of carbon monoxide and soot. The flame temperature of methane in regular air is around 1960°C or 3560°F. This is around the heat you can expect if you're burning natural gas on a stove or a furnace.

However, if burned in pure oxygen, methane can reach temperatures above 2,800 degrees Celsius or 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, making it useful for high-temperature applications such as welding and industrial processes. The history of natural gas goes back to the ancient world, although it didn't have a very big impact on history. Because it's a gas, it was either trapped beneath the Earth or it would escape into the atmosphere. And because it was odorless and colorless, most people wouldn't have even known that it existed.

However, it did appear in the historical record on occasion. Natural gas was first encountered in the ancient world through natural seeps where gas escaped from underground reservoirs and sometimes ignited spontaneously due to lightning or friction, creating eternal flames. Because the ancients had no idea how these flames sustained themselves, they often became objects of religious significance or practical use.

As early as 1000 BC, the ancient Greeks encountered natural gas in the form of mysterious flames on Mount Parnassus near Delphi. These flames, which burned continuously due to escaping gas, led to the establishment of the Oracle of Delphi, a sacred site where the high priestess was believed to receive prophecies from the god Apollo. Around 500 BC, the ancient Chinese were the first known civilization to harness natural gas for practical purposes.

They discovered natural gas seeps and developed bamboo pipelines to transport it to salt evaporation pans. The gas was burned to boil brine and extract salt, making it one of the earliest industrial applications of natural gas.

Natural gas seeps in Persia were associated with Zoroastrian religious practices. The eternal fires at temples such as the Ateshka of Baku in modern-day Azerbaijan burned continuously, leading to the construction of fire temples, where priests worshipped flames thought to be divinely inspired. And this was pretty much the extent of natural gas use for the next 2,000 or so years. Occasional natural seeps were discovered that would create flames, and they were interesting.

The next big step occurred in 1733, when Stephen Hales, an English scientist, discovered that heating coal released combustible gas. This was known as coal gas. Coal gas isn't quite the same thing as natural gas. It's dirtier and has hydrogen in it, but it was a combustible form of gas. Moreover, it was a byproduct of the creation of coke, a valuable industrial substance in its own right.

In 1792, William Murdoch, a Scottish engineer, was the first to use coal gas for practical lighting in his home and workshop, and he is considered to be the father of gas lighting. Again, he wasn't using natural gas, but he was using gas, which was groundbreaking. In 1807, Murdoch and his employer, the Bolton and Watt Company, demonstrated the first public street lighting with coal gas in London. In 1812, the Gas Light and Coke Company was founded in London, becoming the world's first commercial gas company.

And in 1816, Baltimore became the first American city to use coal gas for street lighting. For much of the next several decades, from the 1820s to the 1860s, cities across Europe and North America built gasworks to create coal gas, fueling rapid urban industrialization. It was mostly for lighting, but there were also people using it for cooking and for heat.

While coal gas was ascendant in the 19th century, there were drawbacks. It wasn't that clean and it required large gasworks to create all the coal gas. An alternative turned out to be gas from the ground. In 1821, William Hart drilled the first known natural gas well in Fredonia, New York, eventually leading to the formation of the Fredonia Gas Light Company in 1858, the first U.S. natural gas company.

Because this gas came from the ground instead of a gasworks, it was called natural gas. We still use the term today. If you've ever wondered if there was a non-natural gas, the answer is yes. It was coal gas. Most natural gas that was produced in the 19th century was a byproduct of petroleum drilling. Most oil drillers actually found the gas to be a hazardous nuisance. They had no easy way to capture, store, or transport the gas from the oil fields to the cities.

As coal gas production decreased, it didn't immediately increase natural gas production. Natural gas required more transportation, extraction, and storage than coal gas. The state of the technology in the early 20th century wasn't conducive to the widespread adoption of natural gas. However, that began to change in the 1920s with the development of seamless steel pipelines.

Seamless steel pipelines were crucial in the rise of natural gas because they significantly improved the safety, efficiency, and feasibility of long-distance gas transportation. Before their development, early pipelines were made of cast iron or riveted steel, which were prone to leaks, corrosion, and pressure limitations. These older materials restricted how far natural gas could be transported, limiting its widespread use.

The post-World War II period saw massive investments in pipeline infrastructure, particularly in North America and Europe, further accelerating the transition from coal gas to natural gas. With seamless steel pipelines in place, natural gas became widely available for residential heating, cooking, and industrial use. However, there was still a problem.

After the war, petroleum became the most important commodity in the world. Because oil was a liquid, it could be transported via a pipeline like gas, but it could also be transported by ship all the way around the world. Gas was limited to where it could be piped. This changed with the development of liquid natural gas, or LNG. Liquid natural gas, as the name implies, involves lowering the temperature of natural gas to the point where it becomes a liquid instead of a gas.

Doing so reduces the volume by approximately 600-fold. However, it has to be kept at temperatures below negative 260 degrees Fahrenheit or 162 degrees Celsius, which poses technical challenges. Natural gas was first liquefied in the laboratory in 1886. Large-scale liquefaction didn't take place until 1918 when it was liquefied to extract helium.

In 1940, the East Ohio Gas Company created the first commercial LNG facility in Cleveland, Ohio. The plant successfully liquefied and stored natural gas, demonstrating the feasibility of LNG as an energy source. However, it also displayed the dangers of LNG. On October 20, 1944, disaster struck when one of the plant's low-quality steel storage tanks developed a crack causing LNG to leak into the city's sewer system.

The gas vaporized, mixed with air, and ignited, triggering a series of explosions and fires that devastated multiple city blocks, killing 130 people and destroying homes and businesses. The real breakthrough in LNG transportation took place in 1959 with the launch of the transport ship, the Methane Pioneer. It successfully transported LNG from the United States to the United Kingdom, proving that LNG could be safely stored and shipped.

The milestone led to the establishment of the first large-scale LNG export terminals in Algeria in 1964, and later in countries such as Qatar, Indonesia, and Australia. In the late 20th and 21st centuries, natural gas use increased dramatically. Gas expanded to more households around the world for heating and cooking, but much of the increase in demand for gas came from electrical generation. There has been a major shift from coal and oil-fired plants to gas-powered plants.

and there are several advantages to electrical generation via natural gas. One of the biggest benefits is higher efficiency, especially with combined cycle gas turbines, which can achieve efficiency levels of 60% or more compared to 30-40% for coal plants. These plants generate electricity by first using a gas turbine to produce power, and then capturing waste heat to generate additional electricity through a steam turbine, maximizing energy output from the same fuel.

Gas-fired plants also have lower emissions compared to oil or coal-fired plants and also have lower capital costs and faster construction times compared to coal plants. The biggest advantage is that gas-powered plants are highly flexible, meaning that they can be quickly ramped up or down to complement intermittent renewable energy sources like solar and wind, providing grid stability.

One of the reasons why natural gas electrical generation has grown so quickly in the last several decades is because natural gas prices have dropped. The primary reason is due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fracking is a drilling technique used to extract natural gas and oil from deep underground shale formations. The process involves injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemical additives into rock layers, creating small fissures that release trapped hydrocarbons.

Combined with horizontal drilling, fracking allows access to vast shale gas reserves that were previously uneconomical to extract. However, fracking remains a subject of environmental debate due to concerns about water use, groundwater contamination, and seismic activity. As of 2023, global proven natural gas reserves are estimated to be approximately 206 trillion standard cubic meters.

This represents a significant increase from 1960 when reserves were around 19 trillion cubic meters, indicating more than a tenfold growth over the past six decades. The largest current reserves are held by Russia, Iran, Qatar, the United States, Turkmenistan, and Saudi Arabia. More reserves are constantly being found via exploration and new extraction techniques. As of the recording of this episode, natural gas currently accounts for approximately 23% of the world's energy.

That percentage will probably only increase in the future as more countries switch from coal and oil to gas for its efficiency and environmental benefits. Natural gas plays an enormous role in the modern world. The fortunes of entire economies can rise and fall based on their access to gas and its price.

When the ancient Greeks discovered natural gas over 2,000 years ago, they thought it had mystical properties. Given its importance to the world economy today, they just might have been right. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Okun and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Richard Hicks over on Facebook. He writes...

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