Sacred fires in Persia and elsewhere were natural gas seeps that may have been ignited by lightning. The temple of Delphi was built around a “burning spring.” Around 400 BCE the Chinese discovered natural gas bubbling through brine, which they separated and burned to distill salt. Around 200 CE the Chinese learned to tap natural gas deposits and route the gas through bamboo pipes to distill salt from seawater and cook food. The earliest reference to natural gas in the United States was in the 1600s when explorers noted certain Indian tribes burning gaseous emissions from the earth.

In 1821, a more organized approach to capturing escaping or seep gas started in Fredonia, New York, when a gunsmith piped seep gas to nearby buildings for lighting. In 1827, another source of naturally occurring seep gas was harnessed to supply a lighthouse on Lake Erie. In 1840, the first industrial use of natural gas occurred in Pennsylvania, where gas was burned to heat brine to distill salt, the same thing the Chinese had done two millennia earlier.

While natural gas provided the lift for Drake’s well, for the most part, natural gas found along with oil was vented to the atmosphere. Drilling for oil and discovering natural gas was equivalent to a dry hole. Natural gas was normally out of reach of municipalities and was unable to compete with manufactured gas protected by municipal franchises. In 1872 the Rochester Natural Gas Light Company was formed to provide natural gas to Rochester, New York, from a field 25 miles away.

Pipes made of two to eight foot segments of hollowed-out Canadian white pine logs reflected the primitive state of pipeline technology. The problems associated with a rotting and leaking wooden pipeline eventually led to the demise of the Rochester Natural Gas Light Company. In the same year a 5 1/2 mile, 2 inch wide wrought-iron pipeline was successfully constructed to carry waste gas from oil wells near Titusville to 250 townspeople.

But cast and wrought-iron pipelines were plagued by breaks and leaking connections held together by screws. Before the day of compressors, transmission distance was limited by gas well pressure. In 1870, Pittsburgh became the first city to start consuming natural gas as a substitute for coal to clean up its smoke-laden atmosphere. The Natural Gas Act, passed in 1885 by the Pennsylvania legislature, permitted natural gas to compete with manufactured gas.

This proved to be the driving wedge that enabled natural gas to penetrate the manufactured coal gas business and resulted in the formation of Peoples Natural Gas, which by 1887 was serving 35,000 households in Pittsburgh. Another Pittsburgh natural gas distributor, Chartiers Valley Gas, was the first company to telescope pipe from an initial eight to ten and finally twelve inches in diameter to reduce gas pressure before it entered a home, business or industrial plant.

By this time screws had given way to threaded pipe to hold pipe segments together. Dresser and Company, formed in 1880, specialized in pipe couplings, and in 1887 received a patent for a leak-proof coupling that incorporated a rubber ring in the pipe joints; an invention that would dominate the market until the 1920s.

Heartland Energy Colorado is one of the top hydrocarbon-based energy providers in the USA. They have many drilling locations throughout the country and remain one of the top producers of US oil & gas companies. For more information on Heartland Energy Colorado, see Heartland Energy Development Corporation online.

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