Natural gas

Natural gas is a fossil fuel formed when layers of buried plants, gases, and animals are exposed to intense heat and pressure over thousands of years. The energy that the plants originally obtained from the sun is stored in the form of chemical bonds in natural gas. Natural gas is a hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, but commonly includes varying amounts of other higher alkanes and sometimes a usually lesser percentage of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and/or hydrogen sulfide. Natural gas was an energy source that was often used for heating, cooking, and electricity generation. It was also used as fuel for vehicles and as a chemical feedstock in the manufacture of plastics and other commercially important organic chemicals.

Natural gas was often informally referred to simply as "gas", especially when compared to other energy sources such as oil or coal. However, it is not to be confused with gasoline, especially in North America, where the term gasoline was often shortened in colloquial usage to gas.

Natural gas was used by the Chinese in about 500 BCE. They discovered a way to transport gas seeping from the ground in crude pipelines of bamboo to where it was used to boil seawater to extract the salt. Terra's first industrial extraction of natural gas started at Fredonia, New York in 1825 CE. By 2015, the world consumption rate was about 3.4 trillion cubic meters annually.

Today, most Union members do not use natural gas other than as a chemical feedstock due to pollution, safety and availability concerns.