Theres community buses at my campus have a VERY large print along the side that say. “Powered by clean natural gas”. What does that mean. Isnt all gas natural?
In: 61
Okay, Natural gas 101.
The product known as natural gas is a combination of many similar gases collected from the same well. The percentages vary, but yes methane is the predominant percentage. Graphic illustration ([https://www.croftsystems.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/gas-composition-600×503.png](https://www.croftsystems.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/gas-composition-600×503.png))
When properly combusted, the only byproducts are CO2 and H20. The concession there is “properly”. It is easier to maintain a burner that is in place, like your furnace or hot water heater, than one that is mobile and banged about willy nilly due to our fantastically maintained roadways.
“Clean” natural gas is either recovered methane or natural gas from the wells that has the condensates, sulphides and other base contaminents scrubbed. How it’s marketed will never please the granola eaters s so too bad.
NG with a high sulpher content is “sour” gas and a corrosive quality.
Propane is also a percentage of natural gas, but is stripped away for it’s own uses.
20 years in ng distribution, now working with fibre optic distribution
Not all gas is ‘natural’. Some buses run on Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) produced by distilling oil and some buses in certain cities run on biogas obtained from sewage, which is the cleanest of all.
Could be natural gas from ‘sustainable’ sources like anaerobic digestion or extracted from landfill gas.
If you’re in USA it’s most likely the buses run solely on bioethanol or biodiesel – the fuel originates from agriculture instead of fossil fuels. It’s deemed clean as the plants took CO2 from the atmosphere (recently) to grow and that CO2 is just being returned to where it came from.
We don’t use methane (what we normally call natural gas) for vehicles as it’s too expensive relative to fuel from crops or oil.
[Natural gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas) is a technical term for a specific kind of gaseous hydrocarbon used as fuel. It’s almost entirely methane.
They’re using “clean” as an adjective, compared to, say, diesel or gasoline-powered engines, because there are far fewer nasty byproducts from using it as a fuel compared to those, and less CO2 for its energy output.
It is Propaganda. There are no clean fossil fuels, they all release carbon dioxide into the air. “Natural gas” happens to be a bit more efficient than gasoline or diesel, and releases less particle pollution. But it should not be thought of as clean energy because it’s not.
It’s all marketing. Natural gas is a euphemism for methane, a greenhouse gas. There’s no such thing as “clean” natural gas. Methane has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, the other major greenhouse gas.
It’s a marketing ploy. There’s no such thing as “clean” natural gas. They’re lying to you. If you’re burning something for power (other than hydrogen) it’s not clean.
Latest Answers