Donna Frazzin, age 10, of Youngstown, Ohio, for her question:
WHAT IS NATURAL GAS?
Natural gas is one of the most important things you can imagine. we use it for heating many of our homes. Industry
depends on it for just about everything that is produced in' our factories all the way from the making of cloth and plastics to all types of metal products. And, as everybody knows, we are now faced with a shortage. We must use it wisely.
Natural gas is actually the energy of the sun that has been stored in the ground for a long time. It is found where we obtain petroleum. Gas and oil were made many millions of years ago when dead plants and animals were buried under rock during the time when great changes were being made in the earth's surface.
Decaying bodies became gas and oil through a slow chemical change. Rock in layers has held the gas and oil in pools or thick beds of sand.
Natural gas is found in the United States, Canada and many other parts of the world. It is lighter than air and has no color or odor. It is mostly methane, which means that one atom of carbon is combined with four atoms of hydrogen. When methane burns, it combines with the oxygen of the air to give off heat. In burning, it forms two other odorless and colorless gases, carbon dioxide and water vapor.
First American natural gas well was drilled in Fredonia, N.Y., in 1821. In 1859 Edwin L.aDrake drilled an oil well in Titusville, Pa., and the rush was on. Lots of natural gas was found with the oil, but it took a number of years before men learned how to use it, well.
About 1920 the largest fields of natural gas were discovered in the Monroe field in Louisiana, the Panhandle in Texas and the Hugoton in Kansas. Most of the natural gas of the United States is in Texas and the nearby states along the Gulf Coast. Western Canada also has large natural gas fields, especially in the Turner Valley of Alberta.
Natural gas is also found in the Middle East, South America and Mexico, but there is none in the British Isles. In Europe, gas must be manufactured from coal and oil.
Pipes are used to move natural gas from the fields to distant cities. Strong pipes that can hold high pressures were developed by the steel men about 1930 that made it
possible to move natural gas from Texas to the northern Midwest.
First pipelines were laid between 1870 and 1880 but were only a few inches in diameter and only a few miles long.