“The term natural gas does not explicitly convey the fossil origins of such gas, leading to potential misunderstandings and hampering policy-making,”
“The term natural gas does not explicitly convey the fossil origins of such gas, leading to potential misunderstandings and hampering policy-making,”
It’s funny to me, because when it was coined, natural gas made SENSE. See town gas, the majority of gas used in cities, was made at gas plants from coal or wood and piped to homes as a clean burning fuel. You’d have gas plants that created the gas. Natural gas, therefore, was just gas that was natural and not made vs the syngas that most people had used. It wasn’t some sort of nefarious marketing ploy, it was just an apt description of where the gas came from.
Edit: and to clarify, natural gas was a whole hell of a lot safer than town gas. The ole head in the oven suicide trope was based on town gas having a high percentage of carbon monoxide.
The gas didn’t have carbon monoxide. The gas released carbon monoxide as a byproduct when the gas was combusted to release the heat for the oven.
Incorrect. The production of town gas from coal created large amounts of carbon monoxide due to the incomplete pyrolysis process employed. People didn’t turn the oven on, they just turned on the gas. Suicide rates in england dropped more than a quarter after the switch over to natural gas. Town gas is mostly hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
https://caer.uky.edu/power-generation/coal-gasification/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas