What Is Methane Used For?

Methane is used for generating electricity, heating buildings, firing industrial furnaces, fueling fleets and ships, and serving as the feedstock for hydrogen, ammonia fertilizer, methanol, and synthetic materials.

It reaches nearly all of those uses as natural gas, which is mostly methane.

How Is Methane Used to Generate Electricity?

Natural gas generated about 41% of U.S. utility-scale electricity in 2025, ahead of coal, nuclear, wind, and solar.

Combined-cycle plants burn gas in a turbine, then capture the exhaust heat to raise steam for a second turbine, landing around 60% thermal efficiency with the best units near 64%.

Simple-cycle plants run the gas turbine alone, without the steam stage, and land at roughly 35% to 42% efficiency. They start much faster, though, with a modern peaking turbine reaching full output in under 15 minutes.

That ramp rate is one reason why gas plants keep getting built next to wind and solar farms. When wind output drops or the sun sets on a solar-heavy grid, a utility needs generation it can dispatch on a few minutes’ notice.

How Do Buildings and Commercial Kitchens Use Methane for Heat?

Buildings burn methane for space heating, hot water, and cooking, with furnaces, boilers, and water heaters accounting for most of the volume.

Natural gas was the main space heating fuel in nearly half of U.S. homes in 2024, still the most common heating fuel in the country even as electric heat pumps became popular.

Commercial buildings use it for the same jobs at a different scale. Hotels run gas boilers for hot water and laundry, and school districts and hospitals use it for building heat.

Restaurant kitchens want something different from it. Line cooks choose gas ranges for the visible, instant flame control, and high-output wok and fryer burners are built around heat that’s there the moment the burner opens.

Which Industrial Processes Burn Methane for Direct Heat?

Manufacturers burn methane wherever a process needs a hot, controlled flame in direct contact with the product.

Glass melting is one example. Furnaces hold 1,500°C to 1,700°C (2,732°F to 3,092°F) around the clock, and the melting stage alone accounts for over half the energy used to make glass.

Many glass plants fire natural gas with pure oxygen instead of air. Pulling the nitrogen out of the equation raises flame temperature and improves fuel efficiency, and it cuts nitrogen oxide formation because there’s far less atmospheric nitrogen in the furnace to oxidize.

Steel reheat furnaces, aluminum melters, ceramic kilns, and food-processing ovens and dryers apply the same idea at lower temperatures. Since pipeline gas typically runs above 90% methane, its combustion behavior in these burners is close to that of pure methane.

Why Is Methane the Starting Point for Hydrogen and Ammonia?

Methane starts the chain because each molecule carries four hydrogen atoms bonded to a single carbon, the richest hydrogen-to-carbon ratio of any fossil feedstock.

Steam methane reforming is how producers separate those hydrogen atoms from the carbon. Steam at 700°C to 1,000°C (1,292°F to 1,832°F) reacts with methane over a nickel catalyst to yield hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and a following water-gas shift step converts that carbon monoxide into additional hydrogen. Roughly 95% of hydrogen produced in the United States comes from natural gas reforming.

Ammonia plants feed that hydrogen straight into the Haber-Bosch reaction, combining it with nitrogen pulled from the air at 400°C to 500°C (752°F to 932°F) and pressures above 100 bar. About 80% of the world’s ammonia ends up as fertilizer.

Natural gas is the largest cost in producing ammonia, so a gas price spike causes the price of fertilizer to increase for growers.

What Chemicals and Materials Are Made From Methane?

Outside the ammonia chain, methanol is the largest chemical made from methane, with 55% to 65% of global production starting from natural gas and most of the rest from coal.

Formaldehyde is the biggest derivative—formaldehyde resins are the adhesives in particleboard, plywood, and engineered wood panels. Acetic acid and olefins come next in volume. Methanol also feeds methyl chloride, roughly half of which becomes the chlorosilanes used to manufacture silicone.

Acetylene is made either from methane or from calcium carbide. The methane route burns natural gas with oxygen in a deliberately oxygen-starved flame, cracking it to acetylene, and quenching the products within milliseconds freezes the reaction before the acetylene breaks back down.

Carbon black comes from methane through the thermal black process, which cracks natural gas in a refractory-lined furnace into solid carbon plus a hydrogen-rich off-gas that then fires the paired furnace on the next cycle. Most U.S. production instead uses the oil furnace process, which runs on heavy petroleum feedstock and leaves the thermal black process a small share.

Where Is Methane Used as a Vehicle and Marine Fuel?

Methane fuels transit buses, refuse trucks, port drayage tractors, long-haul rigs, and ocean-going ships, moving as a compressed gas for short-radius fleets and as a cryogenic liquid for longer hauls.

Compressed natural gas (CNG) is stored onboard at pressures up to 3,600 psi. Fleets that return to one yard every night are the core users, because central refueling makes the thin public network irrelevant to them. There are hundreds of public CNG stations nationwide.

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is the same fuel chilled to about -162°C (-260°F), dense enough to carry the range those trips demand. LNG carries no added odorant, so vehicles and maintenance garages depend on electronic methane sensors rather than a driver smelling a leak.

Ships have traditionally burned heavy fuel oil, a cheap refining residue that carries a lot of sulfur. The International Maritime Organization capped that sulfur at 0.50% globally in 2020, tightening to 0.10% inside emission control areas that cover most U.S. and Canadian coastlines. So, operators have to buy more expensive low-sulfur fuel, fit exhaust scrubbers to clean the emissions, or switch fuels. LNG contains essentially no sulfur, so a vessel running on it meets both sulfur limits without exhaust scrubbing.

Demand from vehicle use is still a rounding error, at about two-tenths of 1% of U.S. natural gas demand. Methane has to be compressed or liquefied before it fits onboard, so every fleet that switches needs purpose-built tanks and its own fueling infrastructure, which keeps adoption to operations that can justify building all of it.

How Is Methane Used in Labs and Advanced Manufacturing?

In technical settings, methane serves as a certified measurement standard and as a source of carbon atoms.

Methane blended in nitrogen or air, certified to a known concentration, serves as a calibration standard for hydrocarbon analyzers. EPA test methods that measure methane in stack emissions call for exactly that kind of certified gas, traceable to a documented assay.

Chemical vapor deposition uses methane as the carbon it lays down. Lab-grown diamond typically runs on a feed of methane diluted in 94% to 99% hydrogen, where methyl radicals supply carbon to the growing crystal and atomic hydrogen strips away carbon that doesn’t bond as diamond.

Graphene takes the same input at a different setting—methane flowed over copper foil near 1,000°C (1,832°F) lays down carbon one atom thick, since carbon barely dissolves into copper, and the growth is self-limiting.

If you’re considering how methane fits into your operation, reach out to us at WestAir and we can talk it through.

Tyler O'Brien

Tyler is a results-driven marketing professional specializing in the industrial gases and equipment industry, bringing his 10 years of technical expertise and digital marketing acumen to the complex industrial gas B2B environment.