Natural gas is an indispensable energy resource throughout most of the industrialized world. In American homes, natural gas is used in furnaces, stoves, water heaters, clothes dryers, and other appliances. The fuel also supplies energy for numerous industrial processes and provides raw materials for making many products that we use every day. The largest sources of natural gas in the United States are found in Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma, western Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

The Chinese were the first people known to have discovered and used natural gas. As early as 940 B.C., they found gas underground and piped it through hollow bamboo poles to the seashore, where they burned it to boil off ocean water and collect the leftover salt. By 615 B.C., the Japanese were producing gas from similar wells. Other ancient civilizations may have accidentally discovered natural gas seeping up from the ground. When they...