Why Natural Gas?

Natural Gas is an interesting thing.

It’s a mixture of carbon and hydrogen. The sources of natural gas are primarily underground, produced by decaying plants and animals buried deep underground. In other words, it’s a fossil fuel.

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 Natural Gas is widely used in the United States, with over 65,900,000 residential, 5,300,000 commercial, and 189,000 industrial consumers using natural gas in 2011. In fact, natural gas accounts for about 25.5% of all energy use in the United States in 2011.  It heats your home, cooks your food, and even fuels the occasional city bus. Not only that, but it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels like oil and coal.

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                However, it is still a fossil fuel, and perhaps that is one of the largest problems with the stuff. It’s not renewable. With this fact, as well as its widespread use, we have a problem. It’s the same problem as with other non-renewables. Namely, “What do we do when we can’t drill for gas anymore?”

This leads to some questionable drilling practices to procure more (still non-renewable) gas, causing more than a few protests and awareness groups.

If you didn't have an opportunity to click on any of the last few links, the ugly result of all of this is the much-debated fracking. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” for short, is a method of procuring natural gas from shale located deep underground by shooting a mix of chemicals underground to break it apart and free the natural gas within. This water-intensive, potentially hazardous, and wildly debated issue is still raging, especially in NYC. But this isn't a blog post about fracking.

The question remains to be addressed of “Why Natural Gas?” We know what’s wrong about fracking, but what is right about natural gas? Well, for starters, there are tons of different uses for natural gas, and plenty of different reasons to love it. Here are some of our favorites:

·         Cooking with natural gas keeps your kitchen cooler and gives you better control over your food’s temperature.

·         Natural gas burns cleaner than coal and oil.

·         If you’re into this sort of thing, the gas we use in the US is largely domestic, as opposed to the largely imported fuel oil and coal.

·         We can make a switch over to renewable hydrogen pretty painless using existing natural gas pipelines.

·         Hythane Co. LLC produces a mix of hydrogen and natural gas for an overall excellent fuel source.

·         Last but not least, biogas is very cool.

So we've got plenty of perfectly sane reasons to use natural gas. We've even got some ways to use existing infrastructure for hydrogen, and to make natural gas itself partially or wholly renewable.

 Let’s be ethical about our extraction, switch coal and oil for natural gas and renewables, and transition towards 100% renewable fuel sources as effectively as possible. That way, we’ll all come out of this ahead.