What is “natural gas” and why is it the cleanest burning of all the fossil fuels?
Natural gas is probably the cleanest of all the fossil fuels because, first of all, there is very little refining done to it. A gallon of gasoline comes by going to some far off country, drilling deep into the earth to get the oil, transporting it back to a refinery and running it through the refinery. All of that takes a tremendous amount of energy and pollution before you get a useable unit of energy you can put into your car. Natural gas such as methane comes out of the ground, out of landfills, or out of decomposing agricultural waste. Natural gas is pretty much in useable form and goes straight into your tank. When you burn gasoline, because its a liquid and because there’s a lot of sulfur and other materials in it, most of that just goes right out of your tailpipe in the form of pollution. But natural gas being a gas, doesn’t have those pollutants in it. So when you combust natural gas, it’s much cleaner.
