Although the history of natural gas spans thousands of years, the fuel did not become important to our way of life until recently, beginning in the 1930s. Today, 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 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...