The Making of
Natural Gas
What leaves the wellhead is often a damp, sour, unpredictable mix of gases. What arrives at your meter is mostly methane. Making natural gas is really two jobs — cleaning it to an exact specification, then moving a gas that resists being moved.
Every figure on this page is sourced — the notes at the end say where each one comes from.
You probably lit some this morning without seeing it.
The whole journey at a glance — cleaned, then moved
Natural gas is barely “made” at all. The work is getting a wet, sour, variable gas out of the rock, cleaning it to an exact pipeline standard, and then moving a fuel you can neither see nor easily store — by pipeline, or chilled to a liquid for the sea. Tap any stage to look closer.
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One gas you want, and a lot you don’t
Raw gas is mostly methane — but it can arrive wrapped in water, heavier hydrocarbons and non-hydrocarbon gases, and separating clean methane from the rest is the point of the whole plant.
The gas people burn is mostly methane (CH4), the simplest hydrocarbon — one carbon, four hydrogens. What comes out of the ground is not just that. Straight from a well it is often “wet”, carrying heavier liquids, and sometimes “sour”, carrying hydrogen sulphide that has to be removed before sale (EIA).
Methane — the product
The one component you actually want. Pipeline gas is mostly methane, with some ethane usually left in. Nearly all of it is burned for heat and power, but it is also the feedstock for ammonia — gas becomes hydrogen, and hydrogen becomes fertiliser.
Natural gas liquids
Ethane, propane, butanes and pentanes ride along with the methane. They are recovered, not discarded — separated at the plant and sold as feedstock for refineries and petrochemicals, or as fuels in their own right (EIA). Processing recovers value; it doesn’t only clean.
The unwanted passengers
Water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and — in some fields — helium travel with the gas too, and gas carrying hydrogen sulphide is called “sour” (EIA). Water and the sour gases are stripped out to meet pipeline specification; helium, where present, is valuable enough to recover.
Out of the ground, then cleaned up
Two things have to happen before gas is worth anything: you have to get it out of the rock, and you have to clean it to a standard the pipeline will accept. Only then does the real problem begin — moving a gas.
Getting it out. Before any drilling, geologists read seismic surveys — sound waves bounced through the rock — to find formations likely to hold gas, then sink an exploratory well to test them (EIA). Where gas has collected in open, porous rock, a well is often enough and the gas generally flows up on its own. The harder resource is gas locked inside shale, too tight for it to move: there, operators pump water, sand and chemicals down under high pressure to crack the rock open — hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Horizontal drilling combined with fracking transformed US shale-gas production, unlocking rock that was previously uneconomic (EIA). Gas produced alongside crude oil is “associated” gas; where no pipeline can take it away, it may be reinjected, or vented or flared.
Cleaning it up. From the wellhead, gas travels through gathering pipelines to a processing plant — unless it is already dry and clean enough to skip it, which some wellhead gas is (EIA). At the plant, typically three things happen: the water is dried out, unwanted gases such as hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide are removed, and the natural gas liquids are separated off and sold separately. What leaves is dry, pipeline-quality gas — mostly methane, though some ethane is often left in.
Moving it. As gas is separated and pushed along the line it loses pressure, so compressor stations keep it moving; some are turbine-driven and burn a slice of the gas they carry, others run on electric motors. Transmission lines run up to 48 inches across, and robotic “pigs” travel inside to scan for corrosion and leaks. Where a pipeline is impractical — across an ocean — the gas is shrunk instead: cooled to about −162°C, it becomes a liquid occupying about 1/600 of its gaseous volume (EIA), carried cold, not compressed, in insulated cryogenic tanks and warmed back to a gas at the far end.
One last, deliberate touch comes at delivery. Because processed gas is colourless and odourless, a small amount of mercaptan — a sulphur-containing odorant that smells of rotten eggs — is added before the gas reaches consumers, so leaks can be noticed (EIA).
→ Continues elsewhere The Making of Ammonia The single biggest chemical use of natural gas is making hydrogen — and hydrogen makes ammonia, the basis of most of the world’s fertiliser.One wellstream, several products
A processing plant doesn’t make a single thing. It splits the wellstream into pipeline gas and a set of liquids — and that dry gas can then be chilled into LNG for export.
Pipeline (dry) gas
Mostly methane, odorised, sent to the grid. This is the fuel you burn for heat, hot water and electricity. Mostly CH4.
Natural gas liquids
Ethane, propane, butanes and pentanes, recovered as co-products and sold to refineries and petrochemical plants, or as fuels themselves. 4 liquids.
LNG
The same dry gas, chilled to −162°C to about 1/600 of its volume, for transport by ship where no pipeline reaches. −162°C / ×600.
The US, and the world
The United States is the world’s largest gas producer (IEA), so the US-heavy figures below aren’t a quirk — they are the top of the global table. Where the numbers switch from US production to global demand, the change of basis is flagged.
Most of the growth in US output since 2005 came from horizontal drilling and fracking; the single biggest source is now the Marcellus, spanning Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia (EIA).
Top US gas-producing states, 2022 United States
Shares of total US dry natural gas production, 2022 (EIA, Where our natural gas comes from). A regional split, not a global one.
Zoom out, and the US sits at the top of a growing global market. Two independent outlooks point the same way — growth led by Asia and the Middle East, offset by falling European demand.
Growth is slowing, not stopping. IEA has global gas demand growth easing from 2.8% in 2024 to below 1% in 2025, before a new all-time high in 2026. Looking further out, bp’s Current Trajectory scenario puts demand near 4,700 bcm by 2035, about 20% above 2023 — a different institution and horizon, pointing the same way. demand, not production
US figures are production and geography (EIA, 2022 actuals). Global figures are demand and supply outlooks (IEA Gas 2025 base case to 2030; bp Energy Outlook scenario to 2035) — kept apart from US production because the two sit on different bases. At world level production and consumption converge, which is why the global demand total also indicates scale.
A cleaner flame, an unfinished argument
Burned for electricity, gas releases roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal — but that combustion figure is only half the climate story, because gas is mostly methane, and methane leaking anywhere along the chain is itself a potent greenhouse gas.
The case for gas is real and physical: burned for electricity it generally produces less CO2 and fewer conventional air pollutants than coal — around half the CO2 in a typical comparison, and roughly 30% less than oil. That is why it is often framed as a bridge, especially in Asia, still over half-dependent on coal for power.
The complication is upstream. Every stage on this page — fracking, processing, compression, pipelines, liquefaction, the deliberate flaring of gas with nowhere to go — is a chance for methane to escape or for energy to be spent, and none of that shows up in the tidy “half of coal” combustion figure. Liquefaction alone consumes part of the gas it chills. So the honest framing is a tension, not a verdict: gas burns cleaner than coal, but how clean the whole system is depends on how much of it leaks before it is burned.
The outlooks reflect that unfinished argument. In bp’s slower-transition scenario, global gas demand keeps rising into the mid-2030s; in its faster-transition scenario, demand falls, and by 2050 almost 60% of the gas still used is paired with carbon capture. Which of those worlds arrives is exactly the open question.
Natural gas is the fossil fuel that is hardest to place in the energy transition: cleaner than coal at the burner tip, indispensable as a chemical feedstock, and yet made almost entirely of the most potent short-lived greenhouse gas there is. Its future turns less on how it is made than on how tightly it can be kept from leaking.