The invisible giant: A 2,000-year odyssey from sacred flames to super-chilled ships

For a substance you can't see, smell or taste in its natural state, natural gas has a remarkably loud history. Long before it became the backbone of modern power grids, it was an unwanted by-product of oil production — a literal "nuisance" usually flared or vented into the atmosphere like an expensive, invisible smoke signal. 

Today, natural gas accounts for roughly 25% of the global primary energy mix, according to the Energy Institute's 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy — the largest single contributor to growth in global energy supply in 2024, ahead of coal, oil or renewables individually. 

The journey from ancient "eternal flames" to a super-chilled global commodity is one of the most improbable sagas in human history.

Ancient BBQ and bamboo engineering

The gas industry didn't start in a corporate boardroom; it began with sacred phenomena. Around 1000 BCE, civilisations in China, Iran and Greece observed mysterious flames emerging from cracks in the earth and, naturally, built temples around them. The Greeks famously built the Oracle of Delphi over a natural gas vent, believing the vapours provided prophetic insights.

Industry lore adds a colourful footnote: that by the 1st century AD, a Persian king had a royal kitchen built beside a lightning-struck gas seepage to keep his grills burning perpetually. The story is repeated often in energy-history circles, though — like much from this pre-written-record period — it rests on tradition more than documentation.

The ancient Chinese, however, were the true pioneers of midstream infrastructure. Around 500 BCE, they built the first pipelines out of hollow bamboo to channel gas from leakages to evaporators. There, they burned the gas to boil seawater and extract salt — the first recorded practical industrial application of the resource.

Naming the chaos

Despite its ancient use, the scientific world had no name for it until the 17th century. The Flemish chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont coined the term "gas" — derived from the Greek word for "chaos" — after noticing an invisible substance produced during fermentation. 

Later, Robert Boyle used mercury tubes to show that the volume of these "chaotic" substances was inversely proportional to their pressure, establishing Boyle's Law, a cornerstone of modern chemistry.

By the late 18th century, humans stopped waiting for gas to leak out of the ground and started making it. Known as "manufactured gas" or "town gas", this fuel was cooked out of coal or wood in oxygen-poor ovens. 

In 1785, Jan Pieter Minckelers used coal gas to light his lecture hall at Leuven, and by 1812, the Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated in London, marking the birth of the gas utility model.

The American spark and the Bunsen breakthrough

While Europe carbonised coal, the US was about to stumble upon the real thing. In 1821, William Hart — widely regarded as the "father of natural gas" — noticed gas bubbles in a creek in Fredonia, New York. He drilled a 27-foot well, a shallow bore by today's multi-kilometre standards, to light local streetlamps and homes.

Gas remained a difficult domestic partner until 1855, when Robert Bunsen invented a burner that mixed gas with air in the right proportions. The Bunsen burner produced a safe, adjustable blue flame, finally making natural gas a viable fuel for cooking and heating. 

Even so, transportation remained a bottleneck; early pipelines were inefficient, and until the 1890s most gas was used within a few miles of its source.

The era of steel and the rotten-egg smell

The mid-20th century transformed natural gas from a local curiosity into a national necessity. In 1925, the first all-welded pipeline longer than 200 miles was built between Louisiana and Texas, a leap that allowed gas to be moved under high pressure without massive leakage. Between 1906 and 1970, US residential demand for natural gas exploded fifty-fold.

The industry also had to solve a safety problem: gas was explosive but invisible and odourless. In 1937, after a tragic school explosion in New London, Texas, distributors began adding mercaptan — the compound behind that distinctive "rotten-egg" smell — to the gas stream so that leaks could be detected by human noses.

The big chill: LNG goes global

Natural gas's biggest weakness compared with oil is its low volumetric energy density. It is a gaseous diva that needs massive infrastructure — pipelines and storage caverns — to move. The solution was liquefaction. Cooled to a bone-chilling -162°C (-260°F), natural gas turns into a liquid (LNG) and shrinks to 1/600th of its original volume.

The first successful liquefaction experiment took place in 1917, but it wasn't until 1959 that the Methane Pioneer carried the first-ever LNG cargo from the US Gulf Coast to the United Kingdom. This "floating pipeline" technology freed gas from land-based pipes: LNG trade grew at a 7.2% compound annual rate between 1999 and 2013, according to industry data compiled by the International Gas Union. 

According to the IGU's more recent reporting, global liquefaction capacity stood at 494.4 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa) at the end of 2024 and has continued climbing since, with the United States now the world's largest exporter.

Graphic: TBS

The shale revolution: A geologic hustle

For decades, geologists knew vast quantities of gas were trapped in "tight" shale rock, but it was considered economically unrecoverable. That changed in the 1980s and '90s when Mitchell Energy combined horizontal drilling with low-cost hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the Barnett Shale of Texas.

Fracking involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure to crack the rock and prop open tiny fissures, letting the gas flow. This "shale revolution" turned the US from an energy-hungry importer into a global powerhouse. 

What began as a marginal source has since taken over the industry: shale and other tight formations now account for close to 80% of total US dry gas production, according to the EIA — up from a small fraction two decades ago.

Current chaos: 2026 and the modern market

As of August 2026, the natural gas market is a study in volatility and record-breaking statistics. In the United States, marketed natural gas production is hitting record highs; the EIA's latest outlook has dry gas production climbing past 116 Bcf/d by 2027, up from around 108 Bcf/d in 2025. 

Despite this abundance, the world remains on edge. Geopolitical tensions, including disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and strikes on Qatari gas facilities during the recent Iran conflict, have curtailed supplies, driving up demand for American and Australian gas.

In Australia, industrial action at the Ichthys LNG facility — which alone accounts for roughly 10% of the country's LNG exports — has added to the squeeze on Asian buyers already contending with reduced Gulf supply. 

Analysts tracking the disruption note that even a partial, weeks-long stoppage at a single large terminal is enough to move regional benchmark prices, a reminder of how concentrated global LNG supply still is despite decades of expansion.

The view from Chattogram

Nowhere is that concentration risk felt more directly than in Bangladesh, where gas supply runs through a handful of choke points rather than a diversified network. In early August 2026, Chattogram's daily gas demand of around 350 million cubic feet was being met with barely 210 million, a shortfall of roughly 40%, after simultaneous technical and weather problems hit both of the floating LNG terminals off Moheshkhali in Cox's Bazar. 

One of Excelerate Energy's boilers was down for maintenance while a Summit LNG carrier sat unable to berth in rough weather, delaying the unloading of a fresh cargo — a fairly mundane operational hiccup that, because the city has so few alternative sources, cascaded into a city-wide shortage within days.

The knock-on effects were immediate and commercial, not just domestic. Pacific Jeans Group, one of the country's largest garment exporters, was forced to shut nine factories in the Chattogram Export Processing Zone for want of gas — a small illustration, in a single week, of how a fuel most people never see can still decide whether a production line runs.

A bridge to tomorrow?

So what happens next? The industry currently frames natural gas as a "bridge fuel" for the transition to a low-carbon economy. Because it produces significantly lower CO2 emissions than coal when burned for electricity, it is seen as a necessary partner in managing the intermittency of wind and solar power.

The future of gas infrastructure is pivoting toward decarbonisation. This includes:

Renewable Natural Gas (RNG): capturing methane from wastewater, landfills and livestock waste to create a fuel with a negative carbon intensity.

Hydrogen blending: testing whether existing pipelines can carry a mix of natural gas and clean-burning hydrogen.

CCUS: advancing carbon capture, utilisation and storage to catch emissions at the source.

However, the "bridge" narrative is under real scrutiny, not just theoretical dispute. Energy-finance researchers, including analysts at the think tank IEEFA, argue that cheaper domestic gas is now doing the opposite of what the bridge-fuel case predicted in some sectors — sustaining gas-fired demand in industry and power generation rather than yielding to renewables on schedule, which raises the risk that today's gas investment becomes tomorrow's stranded asset. Under the International Energy Agency's Net Zero 2050 scenario, natural gas demand would need to drop drastically from current levels — a trajectory that looks increasingly at odds with the record production and export figures coming out of 2026.

The trillion-dollar question

From the sacred flames of antiquity to a boiler outage off Cox's Bazar that idled garment factories a continent away from where the gas was drilled, natural gas has spent 2,000 years reinventing itself while staying just as easy to take for granted. Whether it remains a permanent destination or just a temporary stepping stone in a decarbonised world is a trillion-dollar question that remains unanswered. 

What is certain, for Chattogram's factory floors as much as for global markets, is that the invisible giant is far from finished with its chaotic journey.