Pretty much title. I never got a full understanding of what gas is. Is it short for gasoline? Does it mean something else? Is it a solid, like oil? Or is it a gas, like… gas? What goes in my car and what runs my oven? Are they different? Are they the same? Is natural gas the same as oil…?
You get the idea, and I would love to finally understand what gas is. Thanks!
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Crude oil is a thick tar of hydrocarbons, it would clog up your engine if you put it in. It’s found in places underground where ancient algae has sat so long under heat and pressure that it became oil. Along with the oil, and sometimes on its own are lighter hydrocarbons that are gaseous at room temp/pressure like methane. These gaseous hydrocarbons are natural gas.
The hydrocarbons in oil are not very useful in their crude oil form, but they can evaporate, so you can slowly heat it up and distill them to separate them out. When you “refine” crude oil like this you get mixtures of subsets of the hydrocarbons present, one of these mixtures is kerosine, another is gasoline, diesel, asphalt tar etc. Some are further refined to be used in plastics, synthetic materials, drugs/chemicals etc.
These are all related. Millions of years ago, decomposing life forms (mostly plants like algae) didn’t fully decompose. Instead it got buried and over a long time, with plenty of heat and pressure, it turned into coal, crude oil, and natural gas. These are all fuels that we burn to release energy.
Natural gas is a gas that we extract and use for a variety of purposes including cooking and heating.
Crude oil is extracted and refined into other products. One of these products is gasoline (often shortened to gas) and used to fuel cars. Gas is a liquid and the name is completely unrelated to the state of matter. The name gasoline is derived from a brand name. it’s kinda like how we call pretty much all cellophane tape scotch tape.
1st Confusion – “gas” is a state of matter meaning not liquid or solid, “gas” is also American English for a specific kind of fuel, gasoline. That’s confusing.
Start with the atoms hydrogen and carbon and think of them like Lego bricks. Each hydrogen atom has 1 “Slot” where it can link to another atom, each carbon has 4 slots.
So at simplest, you can form a molecule with 1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogens around it in a circle. This chemical is a *gas* (State, meaning not liquid).
You can can then add in *another* carbon and make a carbon-carbon link (that’s one link for each carbon) leaving 3 slots in the first carbon for hydrogen, and 3 in the new carbon. So C2H6 is the next simplest chemical. We call this chemical “ethane”. It’s also a gas, but less common in our daily lives.
So now repeat this process, the next molecule is C3H8, call “propane”.
C4H10 is “Butane” and I’ll just skip to C8H18 which is called “octane” and octane is a *liquid.*
All of these chemicals are called “hydrocarbons” because they are just chains of repeating hydrogen and carbon atoms. These molecules are unstable because they really want to burn with oxygen and form CO2 and H20.
To answer your questions –
1. “Oil” is the natural soup of hydrocarbons that formed from ancient plants and algae that died and turned into fossil fuel. It’s basically a soup of all the different molecules I’ve described above. We can “process” oil and separate it down into the individual molecules for different uses and that’s what oil refineries do for us. The break the oil down, package it and send it to different places for different uses.
2. Gasoline is the American English term for a mixture of molecules that we use as car-fuel. It’s very rich in one molecule, “octane” but contains a few others as well. The term has nothing to do with Gas as a state of matter and just comes from the name of an early businessman who sold gasoline fuel. The gasoline you put in your car is a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules, but again, contains a lot of octane. There is a specific logic for *why* they use octane-rich gasoline for cars and via a different logic they use a different molecule for some car.
3. The “Gas” in your home is most likely Methane though propane is also used. The term “natural gas” means methane. Many homes that don’t have a direct gas utility use propane thanks that get filled via truck. So that’s not natural gas, that’s a different molecule.
gas, in this context, is short for refined petroleum products. the point of refining is two-fold. they want to create a stable fluid (won’t catch fire without help) with as long a chain of carbon atoms as they can. the carbon atoms are what you want to burn and produce carbon dioxide, everything else is pollution. there are different types of gas for different types of engine, like a turbine in a plane or a diesel in a truck, but these are minor variations and the goal is the same. they can also make a similar fuel into a gas (the state of matter, not shorthand) that is easier to transport long distances and burn that in power plants, but again, we are talking about the same basic concept.
Some of it is just a matter of coincidence. It’s actually really funny how gasoline got its name. First of all let get things in context. “GAS” just means the state of matter meaning like air or water, basic elementary chemistry definition. It does not mean oil. But “PETROLEUM” meaning “Rock+oil” or its raw form crude oil, where gasoline and natural gas comes from, has one certain chactareristic, it forms a very distinct smelly “gaseous vapor” (like water vapor wich is a state of matter). Solid, liquid, gas and plasma.
Ok now I’m going in a tangent here, but I need to explain this. So there was this guy back 19th century called John Cassell that patented a certain refined formulation of petrol oil that he marketed as “Cazeline oil” named after him. Well at that time, cazeline oil was the one of best petrol you can buy. As you expect lots of knock-offs brand came to be, one of it are Gazoline and Gasoline. The thinking was “Well petrol produce this smelly gas, why not name it gasoline instead of cazeline”. The name gasoline was never patented, so it took off as the most common offbrand name of petrol. Then later just becomes the second name for petrol.
Century later just shorten to just gas, cause apparently gasoline has too much syllables.
So thats how, :
Gas – a state of matter.
Natural gas – a gaseous form of fuel on the same source of crude oil. And
Gas – a shorten name of gasoline, another name of petrol oil
Came to be.
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