There are many advantages and disadvantages of the natural gas as an energy sources. The main advantages of natural gas can classified into three categories which is environment, efficient and economical. This shows that the natural gas is very safe to use. Below shows the advantages of natural gas:
1) Environmental friendly
– It burns cleanest than fossil fuels. Natural gas only has only one carbon and less emission. It emits less carbon dioxide than burning oil and burning coal and also improving the quality of air. The combustion from natural gas is clean, it does leave unsightly ash, soot, bad smells behind and less pollution. Besides, it is the best sources to replace the dirty fossil fuels likes coal and oil for a clean future.
2) Economical
– Natural gas is one of renewable energy that less expensive source of electricity and heat than other burning fuels. Therefore the cost is effective because it is an economical substances. Even though the coal is cheap source of the electricity and heat, but it produced high level of pollution when burning. Then coal cannot be considered as an alternative to the natural gas.
3) Easily transported or transferred
– The natural gas is transferred via sea in large tankers while on land in small tankers or through a complex network of pipelines. Moreover, the natural gas can be easily transferred from the supplier to residential areas using the pipeline network. The pipeline network were built at a certain height above the ground to easier the maintenance such as leaking of the gas.
4) Efficient
– It is easy to transport and has little losses while being delivered to the user and also easy to store. When compared to propane gas, natural gas provides more energy when it burns, which makes it much more efficient.
5) Provides continuous source of power
– Natural gas provides electricity 24 hours throughout the week, where the other sources of its kind do not matches to its endurance.
Natural gas also has a few disadvantages. Below is the disadvantages of the natural gas:
1) Highly Flammable
– Natural gas is a cleaner fossil fuel than coil and oil, but it is highly flammable energy source. Due to this, the special odor is added to the gas to improve detection in case there is a leak of the gas because natural gas is an odourless gas. If there is a leak of natural gas in a room or building the danger of a massive explosion is imminent, and with a spark is enough to ignite the gas and destroy the property, human life and even the nearest properties.
2) Non – renewable and non – sustainable
– Natural gas is a limited resources that will be depleted in a few decades from now on mostly because natural gas will be used as the main energy source on the planet (instead of coal and oil) in the future. Other than that, natural gas also non – sustainable and harmful for the environment.
3) Uses an expensive piping system
– Natural gas uses a complex piping system that is quite expensive to build. Moreover, with the piping system used to transfer natural gas from one place to another can be created by a leak in the system, which is hard and expensive to detect and fix because besides the work required to fix the problem, the leak causes financial loses to the supplier.
4) Long processing process
– The natural gas has other components that has to be removed before transferred to the residential, industry and commercial purpose. This is because it takes a lot of time and manpower to process the natural gas.
5) Storage
– Natural gas is easier to store and transport but it has one big disadvantages. Its volume happens to be four times than pf petrol which makes it more expensive to store since more needs to be spent on additional storage.
As a conclusion, natural gas has both advantages and disadvantages. Despite all the disadvantages, natural gas is one of the cheapest and always be the available fossil fuels in this world. It can be considered that natural gas can serve as an alternative to other fossil fuels till such times as something more efficient can be found in future to replace the natural gas.