Natural gas

Natural gas has occurred naturally for millennia, having manifested its presence through natural seepages from underground, which were often treated as much with curiosity as with fear and reverence. The technology to capture, clean up, store and transport natural gas only became available later in the history of the hydrocarbon industry, and hence natural gas only came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. This was helped by the laying, in the 1930s and 1940s, of several pipelines in the United States and, in the 1960s onwards, by the large pipeline infrastructure projects in Europe, such as Brotherhood, which connected the West Siberian fields of the then Soviet Union to Eastern Europe.