Coal gas contains a variety of calorific gases including hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, and volatile hydrocarbons together with small quantities of non-calorific gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen.
Prior to the development of a natural gas supply and transmission virtually all gas for fuel and lighting was manufactured from coal. Town gas was supplied to households via municipally-owned piped distribution systems.
Originally created as a by-product of the coking process, its use developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries during the industrial revolution and urbanization. By-products from the production process included coal tars and ammonia, which were important chemical feedstock for the dye and chemical industry with a wide range of artificial dyes being made from coal gas and coal tar. Facilities where the gas was produced were often known as a gasworks.
In the 1850s every small to medium-sized town and city had a gas plant to provide for street lighting. Subscribing customers could also have pipe lines to their houses. In this era, gas lighting became accepted. Gaslight trickled down to the middle class and later came gas cookers and stoves.
Gases liberated in the high-temperature coking of coal in a retort were collected, scrubbed and used as fuel. Depending on the goal of the plant, the desired product was either a high quality coke for metallurgical use with the gas being a side product, or the production of a high quality gas with coke being the side product. Coke plants are typically associated with metallurgical facilities such as smelters, and blast furnaces, while gas works typically served urban areas.
The discovery of large reserves of natural gas in the North Sea off the United Kingdom's coast during the early 1960s led to the expensive conversion or replacement of most of the nation's gas cookers and gas heaters - Wikipedia.
