Southern African Natural Gas Advisory Service Service

Industrial Applications

The industrial sector has traditionally been the largest single user of natural gas. Although this situation is now changing with electricity generation taking the lead in some countries as the largest user of natural gas, industry remains a major consumer.

Factories in mature gas markets use large quantities of natural gas for a wide variety of applications. In addition to generating their own electricity in many instances, natural gas provides premium processing heat favoured in many industries such as the manufacture of glass, ceramics, textiles, plastics, metals, pharmaceutical and food processing sectors. The cleanliness of natural gas and the controllability mean it is an ideal energy source for many precision production processes.

With a wide array of advanced gas utilization technologies, industry around the world has been able to increase efficiency and enhance its competitive position by using natural gas. Innovative furnaces bring higher productivity and greater control and efficiency while saving energy costs.

While enabling greater productivity natural gas in industry has also substantially reduced emissions and local pollution while being deployed for a range of materials heat treatment, fluid heating and the curing and drying of different materials. Modern combustion techniques using natural have also substantially reduced the emission of nitrogen oxides when compared with conventional methods.

Natural gas is also being used in ever larger quantities in heavy industry. An example of this is in the steel industry where with the injection of natural gas into blast furnaces enables efficiencies and the quality of the steel produced to be increased.

Harmful emissions are also substantially reduced and the need to consume coke in the process may be reduced by almost 20%.          

It is also in the industrial use of natural gas that impressive improvements have been achieved with energy efficiency in recent years.

It is for this reason that in many mature gas markets, the traditional industrial use of gas is estimated to decline in the future while at the same time it is forecast that there will be greater use for co-generation and the advanced industrial production technologies of the future.