24 BULLETIN 102, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
Those activities concerned with the production, transportation, 
and marketing of natural gas constitute the natural-gas industry. It 
is largely independent of the petroleum industry, although partly 
overlapping in production. It consists, in the main, of a large 
number of independent companies in the form of public-service cor- 
porations, although some oil companies market their surplus gas. 
The drilling of gas wells is not essentially different from that of oil 
wells ; but gas, unlike oil, can not be stored in the field and hence is 
piped directly to centers of consumption. The gas emerges from 
new wells under high pressure, * 1 but as this declines within a com- 
paratively brief period, the gas field is equipped with compressors 
which serve to increase the speed and volume of the gas that may be 
transmitted through gas pipes to distributing stations. 
The wastes in natural gas have been appallingly great in the 
past, and even now, with some of the most glaring points of waste- 
fulness corrected, the resource recovery, by and large, is notoriously 
small. In connection with the production of oil, especially in fields 
distant from markets, there has been little incentive to bother with 
the gas, which has largely been looked upon and treated as a waste 
product, although now known to be necessary to the proper recov- 
ery of the oil. Ify means of mud-laden fluid, the gas-bearing beds 
encountered by the oil-seeking drill may be sealed off and the gas 
conserved for the protection of the oil beds and for subsequent recov- 
ery. The gas flowing from the oil-productive stratum along with the 
oil, particularly in the gusher and youthful period of production, is 
the casing-head gas from which, since 1910, a growing production of 
gasoline has been won. 
In the gas fields proper, which produce the bulk of the natural 
gas supplied to cities, the physical wastes which once prevailed have 
largely been alleviated by correct practice, but there is still economic 
loss, felt in prospect by the communities concerned, resulting from 
the circumstance that small leaseholds and competing wells force 
hasty extraction. This contributes to a general overproduction, lead- 
ing to an offering of the surplus gas to industrial plants at low 
rates in competition with coal. Thus, in 1915, the average price of 
natural gas to industrial users was 10 cents for each 1,000 cubic feet, 
as contrasted with the average rate of 28 cents charged domestic con- 
sumers, a figure none too high as compared with an average rate of 
elining in natural-gas yield have turned to producer-gas made from coal, a less satis- 
factory fuel because not so high in heat value. (See The Glass Industry, Miscellaneous 
Series No. 60, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1917, pp. 187-188.) The 
manufacture of carbon black, or lampblack, used in pigments is an industry almost 
confined to West Virginia, where in 1915 from 19,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas 
there was manufactured 17,000,000 pounds of carbon black, the gas for this purpose 
having an estimated average value of 2.34 cents per 1,000 cubic feet. 
1 In some instances the pressure is so high, upwards of 1,000 feet to the square inch, 
(hat it has to be reduced before piping. In general the pressure of casing-head gas is 
much lower than that of “ dry ” gas. 
