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!
In: 5
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.
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