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Natural gas is the third major form of
fossil fuel.

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It's methane, mostly.

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Basically, you can get natural gas from
either

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the coal peat kind of organic
carbon.

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or from the plankton oil source kind of
organic carbon.

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As long as it's heated up enough.

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It cooks and forms
some methane.

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Because methane

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is a gas,

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it's more difficult to transport, than
either oil or coal,

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because it has to be held in a pressurized
container

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For that reason, the
price of

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natural gas varies hugely, from place to
place, around the world.

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There are places in the world where
natural gas is worth basically nothing.

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It comes out as a by-product of
getting oil and they just

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burn it rather than try to keep it.

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methane is the most reduced form of
carbon.

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It has the most energy per carbon
released and

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it also tends to burn more cleanly than
either 

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coal, which makes these aerosols and little particles
in the atmosphere, 

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or oil, which tends to leave reactive compounds that
make urban smog.

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For those reasons

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methane is called a cleaner fuel than oil,
or or coal,

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but it's still a fossil fuel and it's
still releasing carbon to the atmosphere.

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Most of the major gas reserves on
Earth

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are found underneath an impermeable
cap kind of rock, either permafrost,

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like in Siberia, or salt deposits from
evaporated sea water in the Middle East.

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there's also vast amount of methane in a
very spread out and probably mostly

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inaccessible form known as methane
hydrates in

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ocean sediments, very spread out.

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But there could be thousands

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of gigatons of methane as methane
hydrates.