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52-536: From the early 19th century the gas supply industry in the United Kingdom was mainly operated by local authorities and private companies. A flammable gas (known as "town gas" or " coal gas ") was piped to commercial, domestic and industrial customers for use as a fuel and for lighting. It was marketed to consumers by such means as the National Gas Congress and Exhibition in 1913. The gas used in

104-482: A gas explosion . For this reason, odorizers are added to most fuel gases. The most common type of fuel gas in current use is natural gas . There are two broad classes of fuel gases, based not on their chemical composition, but their source and the way they are produced: those found naturally, and those manufactured from other materials. Manufactured fuel gases are those produced by chemical transformations of solids, liquids, or other gases. When obtained from solids,

156-495: A by-product of the coking process, its use developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries tracking the Industrial Revolution and urbanization . By-products from the production process included coal tars and ammonia , which were important raw materials (or "chemical feedstock ") for the dye and chemical industry with a wide range of artificial dyes being made from coal gas and coal tar. Facilities where

208-641: A consignment of LNG from Lake Charles, Louisiana , US, to a new LNG terminal on Canvey Island , in the Thames estuary in Essex, England. A 212-mile (341 km) long high-pressure trunk pipeline was built from Canvey Island to Bradford. The pipeline and its branches provided Area Gas Boards with natural gas for use in reforming processes to make town gas. A large-scale LNG reception plant was commissioned on Canvey in 1964, which received LNG from Algeria in two dedicated tankers, each of 12,000 tonnes. The slow decline of

260-437: A feedstock for chemical processes. Fuel gas in the commercial sector is used for heating, cooking, baking and drying, and in the domestic sector for heating and cooking. Currently, fuel gases, especially syngas, are used heavily for the production of ammonia for fertilizers and for the preparation of many detergents and specialty chemicals. On an industrial plant fuel gas may be used to purge pipework and vessels to prevent

312-406: A feedstock to chemical reactions that produce gas. The first process used was the carbonization and partial pyrolysis of coal . The off gases liberated in the high-temperature carbonization ( coking ) of coal in coke ovens were collected, scrubbed and used as fuel. Depending on the goal of the plant, the desired product was either a high quality coke for metallurgical use, with the gas being

364-496: A feedstock to manufacture town gas. These facilities utilised the chemical reaction processes described above. The rise of oil as a feedstock to manufacture town gas is shown on the graph below. The peak usage in 1968/9 and subsequent decline coincides with the availability of North Sea gas which, over the next few years, displaced town gas as a primary fuel and led to the decline of oil as a feedstock for gas making, as shown. Oil-based town gas production, millions of therms By

416-406: A gas appliance. The calorific value of manufactured gas is around 500 Btu per cubic foot (18,629 kJ/m ). Whereas, the calorific value of natural gas is twice that at around 1000 Btu per cubic foot (37,259 kJ/m ). For a given amount of heat only half the volume of natural gas is required.   One of the earliest uses was gas lighting , which enabled the widespread adoption of streetlamps and

468-406: A producer (generator), carburettor and a super heater connected in series with gas pipes and valves. During a make run, steam would be passed through the generator to make blue water gas. From the generator the hot water gas would pass into the top of the carburettor where light petroleum oils would be injected into the gas stream. The light oils would be thermocracked as they came in contact with

520-527: A separate body with its own management structure. Under the Gas Act 1948 the area boards were charged with three duties: The management board for each area board typically comprised: The chairman of each area board was a member of the Gas Council . Each area board was divided into geographical groups or divisions which were often further divided into smaller districts. These boards simply became known as

572-400: A side product, or the production of a high quality gas, with coke being the side product. Coke plants are typically associated with metallurgical facilities such as smelters or blast furnaces , while gas works typically served urban areas. A facility used to manufacture coal gas, carburetted water gas (CWG), and oil gas is today generally referred to as a manufactured gas plant (MGP). In

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624-400: A wide variety of feedstocks in some mixture of air, oxygen, or steam, to reduce the latter to hydrogen and carbon monoxide although some destructive distillation may also occur. Manufactured gas can be made by two processes: carbonization or gasification . Carbonization refers to the devolatilization of an organic feedstock to yield gas and char . Gasification is the process of subjecting

676-435: Is a more general term referring to manufactured gaseous fuels produced for sale to consumers and municipalities. The original coal gas was produced by the coal gasification reaction, and the burnable component consisted of a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen in roughly equal quantities by volume. Thus, coal gas is highly toxic . Other compositions contain additional calorific gases such as methane , produced by

728-404: Is contrasted with liquid fuels and solid fuels , although some fuel gases are liquefied for storage or transport (for example, autogas and liquified petroleum gas ). While their gaseous nature has advantages, avoiding the difficulty of transporting solid fuel and the dangers of spillage inherent in liquid fuels, it also has limitations. It is possible for a fuel gas to be undetected and cause

780-488: Is demonstrated in this graph. Coal-based town gas production, millions of therms New technologies for manufacturing coal gas using oil, refinery tail gases, and light distillates were developed. Processes included the Lurgi Process , catalytic reforming , the catalytic rich gas process, steam reforming of rich gas, and the gas recycle hydrogenator process. The catalytic rich gas process used natural gas as

832-449: Is now a restored gasworks museum). The Portadown site has been cleared and is now the subject of a long-term experiment into the use of bacteria for the purpose of cleaning up contaminated industrial land. As well as requiring little processing before use, natural gas is non-toxic; the carbon monoxide (CO) in town gas made it extremely poisonous, accidental poisoning and suicide by gas being commonplace. Poisoning from natural gas appliances

884-515: Is only due to incomplete combustion, which creates CO, and flue leaks to living accommodation. As with town gas, a small amount of foul-smelling substance ( mercaptan ) is added to the gas to indicate to the user that there is a leak or an unlit burner, the gas having no odour of its own. The organisation of the British gas industry adapted to these changes, first, by the Gas Act 1965 by empowering

936-507: Is shown in the graph below. Until 1968 this was from supplies of LNG from Algeria, until North Sea gas was available from 1968. Natural gas available, millions of therms The exploitation of the North Sea gas reserves , entailing landing gas at Easington , Bacton and St Fergus made viable the building of a national distribution grid, of over 3,000 miles (4,800 km), consisting of two parallel and interconnected pipelines running

988-536: The Fischer–Tropsch process , and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen . Prior to the development of natural gas supply and transmission—during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States and during the late 1960s and 1970s in the United Kingdom and Australia—almost all gas for fuel and lighting was manufactured from coal. Town gas

1040-502: The "gas board", a term people still use when referring to British Gas , the company that replaced the boards when the Gas Act 1972 was passed. The area boards became regions of the British Gas Corporation. Coal gas Coal gas is a flammable gaseous fuel made from coal and supplied to the user via a piped distribution system. It is produced when coal is heated strongly in the absence of air. Town gas

1092-399: The 1850s by Sir William Siemens . The incandescent fuel bed would be alternately blasted with air followed by steam. The air reactions during the blow cycle are exothermic, heating up the bed, while the steam reactions during the make cycle, are endothermic and cool down the bed. The products from the air cycle contain non-calorific nitrogen and are exhausted out the stack while the products of

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1144-432: The 1860s. Gas oil (an early form of gasoline) was the flammable waste product from kerosene refining, made from the lightest and most volatile fractions (tops) of crude oil. In 1875 Thaddeus S. C. Lowe invented the carburetted water gas process. This process revolutionized the manufactured gas industry and was the standard technology until the end of manufactured gas era. A CWG generating set consisted of three elements;

1196-428: The 1960s, manufactured gas, compared with its main rival in the energy market, electricity, was considered "nasty, smelly, dirty and dangerous" (to quote market research of the time) and seemed doomed to lose market share still further, except for cooking where its controllability gave it marked advantages over both electricity and solid fuel. The development of more efficient gas fires assisted gas to resist competition in

1248-524: The 19th and early 20th centuries was coal gas but in the period 1967–77 coal gas supplies were replaced by natural gas , first discovered in the UK North Sea in 1965. In 1948 Clement Attlee 's Labour government reshaped the gas industry, enacting the Gas Act 1948. The act nationalised the UK gas industry and 1,064 privately owned and municipal gas companies were merged into twelve area gas boards each

1300-590: The Gas Council to acquire and supply gas to the twelve area gas boards . Then, the Gas Act 1972 formed the British Gas Corporation as a single commercial entity, embracing all the twelve area gas boards, allowing them to acquire, distribute and market gas and gas appliances to industrial commercial and domestic customers throughout the UK. In 1986, British Gas was privatised and the government no longer has any direct control over it. During

1352-487: The LNG plant on Canvey. The Fuel Policy White Paper of 1967 (Cmd. 3438) pointed the industry in the direction of building up the use of natural gas speedily to 'enable the country to benefit as soon as possible from the advantages of this new indigenous energy source'. As a result, there was a 'rush to gas' for use in peak load electricity generation and in low grade uses in industry. The growth in availability of natural gas

1404-484: The Second World War as petroleum shortages forced Nazi Germany to develop the Fischer–Tropsch synthesis to produce synthetic fuel for aircraft and tanks. The by-products of coal gas manufacture included coke , coal tar , sulfur and ammonia and these were all useful products. Dyes, medicines such as sulfa drugs , saccharine , and dozens of organic compounds are made from coal tar. The coal used, and

1456-616: The coal gas, but would leave behind a crumbly, low-quality coke not suitable for metallurgical processes. Coal or coke oven gas typically had a calorific value between 10 and 20 megajoules per cubic metre (270 and 540 Btu/cu ft); with values around 20 MJ/m (540 Btu/cu ft) being typical. The advent of electric lighting forced utilities to search for other markets for manufactured gas. MGPs that once almost exclusively produced lighting gas shifted their efforts towards supplying gas for heating and cooking, and even refrigeration and cooling. Fuel gas for industrial use

1508-506: The composition of a gas to its tendency to burn incompletely in a gas appliance. Dutton defined the ICF as: ICF = 0.64 × (W − 50.73 + 0.03 × PN) where W is the Wobbe index, MJ/m ; PN is the volumetric percentage of C 3 H 8 plus N 2 in a three-component mixture. Soot Index (SI) – an empirical index that relates the composition of a gas to its tendency to produce soot during combustion in

1560-401: The conversion is referred to as gasification and the facility is known as a gasworks . Manufactured fuel gases include: The coal gas made by the pyrolysis of coal contains impurities such a tar, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide . These must be removed and a substantial amount of plant may be required to do this. In the 20th century, natural gas , composed primarily of methane , became

1612-476: The dominant source of fuel gas, as instead of having to be manufactured in various processes, it could be extracted from deposits in the earth. Natural gas may be combined with hydrogen to form a mixture known as HCNG . Additional fuel gases obtained from natural gas or petroleum : The composition of natural gas varies widely, but the table shows a typical composition. Natural gas is produced with water and gas condensate. These liquids have to be removed before

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1664-459: The early years of MGP operations, the goal of a utility gas works was to produce the greatest amount of illuminating gas. The illuminating power of a gas was related to amount of soot -forming hydrocarbons ("illuminants") dissolved in it. These hydrocarbons gave the gas flame its characteristic bright yellow color. Gas works would typically use oily bituminous coals as feedstock. These coals would give off large amounts of volatile hydrocarbons into

1716-482: The era of North Sea gas , many of the original cast iron gas pipes installed in towns and cities for town gas were replaced by plastic . As reported in the DTI Energy Review 'Our Energy Challenge' January 2006 North Sea gas resources have been depleted at a faster rate than had been anticipated and gas supplies for the UK are being sought from remote sources, a strategy made possible by developments in

1768-430: The fuel gas by enriching it with CO and hydrogen (H 2 ) produced by water gas reactions. Producer gas has a very low calorific value of 3.7 to 5.6 MJ/m (99 to 150 Btu/cu ft); because the calorific gases CO/H 2 are diluted with much inert nitrogen (from air) and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) (from combustion) The problem of nitrogen dilution was overcome by the blue water gas (BWG) process, developed in

1820-558: The gas can be used as fuel. Even after treatment the gas will be saturated and liable to condense as liquid in the pipework. This can be reduced by superheating the fuel gas. In addition to chemical composition fuel gas may need to comply with parameters such as calorific value , Wobbe index, dewpoint, etc. The following specification is for the British National Transmission System. Incomplete Combustion Factor (ICF) – an empirical index that relates

1872-472: The gas was produced were often known as a manufactured gas plant (MGP) or a gasworks . In the United Kingdom the discovery of large reserves of natural gas, or sea gas as it was known colloquially, in the Southern North Sea off the coasts of Norfolk and Yorkshire in 1965 led to the expensive conversion or replacement of most of Britain's gas cookers and gas heaters, from the late 1960s onwards,

1924-497: The gas-using equipment of almost thirteen million domestic, four hundred thousand commercial, and sixty thousand industrial customers were converted. Many dangerous appliances were discovered in this exercise and were taken out of service. The UK town gas industry ended in 1987 when operations ceased at the last town gas manufacturing plants in Northern Ireland (Belfast, Portadown and Carrickfergus; Carrickfergus gas works

1976-668: The illumination of buildings in towns. Fuel gas was also used in gas burners , in particular the Bunsen burner used in laboratories. It may also be used gas heaters , camping stoves, and even to power vehicles, as they have a high calorific value. Fuel gas is widely used by industrial, commercial and domestic users. Industry uses fuel gas for heating furnaces, kilns, boilers and ovens and for space heating and drying . The electricity industry uses fuel gas to power gas turbines to generate electricity. The specification of fuel gas for gas turbines may be quite stringent. Fuel gas may also be used as

2028-563: The industry produced) to marketing management (meeting the needs and desires of customers) and the lifting of an early moratorium preventing nationalised industries from using television advertising , saved the gas industry for long enough to provide a viable market for what was to come. In 1959 the Gas Council in Great Britain demonstrated that liquid natural gas (LNG) could be transported safely, efficiently and economically over long distances by sea. The Methane Pioneer shipped

2080-498: The length of the country. This became the National Transmission System . All gas equipment in Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) was converted (by the fitting of different-sized burner jets to give the correct gas/air mixture) from town gas to natural gas (mainly methane ) over the period from 1967 to 1977 at a cost of about £100 million, including writing off redundant town gas manufacturing plants. All

2132-410: The market for room heating. Concurrently a new market for whole house central heating by hot water was being developed by the oil industry and the gas industry followed suit. Gas warm air heating found a market niche in new local authority housing where low installation costs gave it an advantage. These developments, the realignment of managerial thinking away from commercial management (selling what

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2184-546: The process being completed by the late 1970s. Any residual gas lighting found in homes being converted was either capped off at the meter or, more usually, removed altogether. As of 2023, some gas street lighting still remains, mainly in central London and the Royal Parks. The production process differs from other methods used to generate gaseous fuels known variously as manufactured gas , syngas , Dowson gas, and producer gas . These gases are made by partial combustion of

2236-473: The steam cycle are kept as blue water gas. This gas is composed almost entirely of CO and H 2 , and burns with a pale blue flame similar to natural gas. BWG has a calorific value of 11 MJ/m (300 BTU/cu ft). Blue water gas lacked illuminants; it would not burn with a luminous flame in a simple fishtail gas jet as existed prior to the invention of the gas mantle in the 1890s. Various attempts were made to enrich BWG with illuminants from gas oil in

2288-530: The steel industry's coke ovens' by-products plants, coal gas is no longer made in the UK. It was replaced first by gas made from oil and later by natural gas from the North Sea . Fuel gas Fuel gas is one of a number of fuels that under ordinary conditions are gaseous . Most fuel gases are composed of hydrocarbons (such as methane and propane ), hydrogen , carbon monoxide , or mixtures thereof. Such gases are sources of energy that can be readily transmitted and distributed through pipes. Fuel gas

2340-449: The technologies of pipelaying that enable the transmission of gas over land and under sea across and between continents . Natural gas is now a world commodity . Such sources of supply are exposed to all the risks of any import. Monty Python parodied the conversion from coal to North Sea gas, and the jumping through hoops some encountered, in their "New Cooker Sketch," as part of the episode that began its second series in 1970. Coal gas

2392-403: The town gas and by-products produced, by the major three gas companies of London are summarised in the table. Coke is used as a smokeless fuel and for the manufacture of water gas and producer gas . Coal tar was subjected to fractional distillation to recover various products, including Used in the manufacture of sulfuric acid Used in the manufacture of fertilisers Coal gas

2444-540: The town gas industry in the UK was driven by the discovery of natural gas by the drilling rig Sea Gem , on 17 September 1965, some forty miles off Grimsby , over 8,000 feet (2,400 m) below the seabed. Subsequently, the North Sea was found to have many substantial gas fields on both sides of the median line defining which nations should have rights over the reserves. In a pilot scheme customers on Canvey Island were converted from town gas to natural gas supplied from

2496-399: The white hot checkerwork fire bricks inside the carburettor. The hot enriched gas would then flow into the superheater, where the gas would be further cracked by more hot fire bricks. Following the Second World War the slow recovery of the British coal mining industry led to shortages of coal and high prices. The decline of coal as a feedstock for town gas production using carbonisation

2548-455: Was initially manufactured by independent companies but in the United Kingdom many of these later became municipal services . In 1948 there was a total of 1,062 gas undertakings. Both the private companies, about two-thirds of the total, and the municipal gas undertakings, about one-third, were nationalised under the Gas Act 1948 . Further restructuring took place under the Gas Act 1972 . For further details see British Gas plc . Apart from in

2600-414: Was made using producer gas technology. Producer gas is made by blowing air through an incandescent fuel bed (commonly coke or coal ) in a gas producer. The reaction of fuel with insufficient air for total combustion produces carbon monoxide (CO); this reaction is exothermic and self-sustaining. It was discovered that adding steam to the input air of a gas producer would increase the calorific value of

2652-443: Was supplied to households via municipally owned piped distribution systems. Sometimes, this was called syn gas , in contrast to natural gas. At the time, a frequent method of committing suicide was the inhalation of gas from an unlit oven. With the head and upper body placed inside the appliance, the concentrated carbon monoxide would kill quickly. Sylvia Plath famously ended her life with this method. Originally created as

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2704-469: Was used to power several historic balloon ascents in the 19th century (see The Aeronauts ). In many ways, Germany took the lead in coal gas research and carbon chemistry. With the labours of August Wilhelm von Hofmann , the whole German chemical industry emerged. Using the coal gas waste as feedstock, researchers developed new processes and synthesized natural organic compounds such as Vitamin C and aspirin . The German economy relied on coal gas during

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