Delivering Natural Gas

A clean, affordable & abundant source of energy 

While natural gas might not cross your mind when you think about electricity, this resource plays an important role in producing power. Duke Energy also distributes natural gas to more than 1.5 million customers in the Carolinas, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. 

Also known as methane, natural gas is colorless and odorless. As a safety measure, we add a distinctive odor to natural gas – it smells like sulfur or rotten eggs. This added odorant enables it to be detected in the event a gas leak occurs.

 

Natural gas at home at work

Commonly associated with a blue flame, clean-burning natural gas has many uses including cooking, water heating, home heating and cooling, gas-fired dryers, fireplaces and grills. Natural gas also has extensive uses in industry. It has become a primary fuel for electricity generation in the U.S. Increasingly, natural gas is being used in combination with other fuels to improve environmental performance and decrease pollution.

How natural gas is delivered

Natural gas is gathered, sometimes along with oil, by drilling into the Earth’s crust where pockets of natural gas were trapped hundreds of millions of years ago. Once the gas is brought to the surface, it is refined to remove impurities, such as water, other gases and sand. Then it is transmitted through pipelines that span the continent to communities where it is processed and used as a valuable energy source.

Natural gas pipeline

Two million miles of gathering, transmission, distribution and service lines make up the natural gas delivery system that safely and reliably delivers natural gas to customers across the U.S.