TABLE OF CONTENTS Natural gas (also called marsh gas or swamp gas in older texts and more recently landfill gas) is a naturally occurring gaseous fossil fuel that is found in oil fields and natural gas fields, and in coalbeds.
For clarification, natural gas is not the same as town gas, which is manufactured from coal and the terms coal gas, manufactured gas, producer gas, and syngas ( synthetic natural gas, SNG) are also used for gas produced from coal. Depending on the production process, gas from coal is a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, and volatile hydrocarbons in varying amounts with small amounts of carbon dioxide and nitrogen as impurities.
Prior to the development of resources, virtually all fuel and lighting gas was manufactured from coal and the history of natural gas cleaning has its roots in town gas cleaning (Chap. 5). The by-product coal tar produced during the manufacture of gas from coal was an important feedstock for the chemical industry. The development of manufactured gas paralleled that of the industrial revolution and urbanization.
The uses of natural gas did not necessarily parallel its discovery. In fact, the discovery of natural gas dates from ancient times in the Middle East. During recorded historical time, there was little or no understanding of what natural gas was; it posed somewhat of a mystery to man. Sometimes, such things as lightning strikes would ignite natural gas that was escaping...
