Still wondering where natural gas comes from and whether it safe for households or not? Here is a fun experiment for homemade natural gas.
All you need is :
- Two plastic bags (Ziplock)
- Cabbage or any other leafy vegetable (spinach or lettuce)
- A measuring cup (250 ml) and measuring tape
- A notebook (for your notes)
- A marker (to mark the bags)
Steps to perform the experiment:
- Once you have collected all the items listed above, tear down the cabbage into pieces of the size of your hand. Fill each of the plastic bags with a cupful (250 ml) of the vegetable pieces and mark them as “bag1” and “bag2”
- Settle the pieces evenly along the bottom of each plastic bag and roll each of the bags from the bottom and press the bags to release all the air out of the bags. Lock the bags or seal them with tape (air tight). This would remove most of the oxygen present in the bag and allows the vegetable to go through the process of anaerobic decay (decay in absence of oxygen)
- Mark the circumference of both the rolled bags with the help of the measuring tapes along with the temperature. The bags can be unrolled and need to be placed in room temperature. No exposure to sulight.
- For the next ten days, make a small table to note down your observations of the measurements of the packet for analysing the expansion in the bag over a few days. (You could tke a picture if you like!) On the tenth day you note down the final measurement of the bags and the room temperature and you can compare for your self what differences there are.
Observation – Compare your results!!
After ten days you will notice, if not both at least one of the bags would have inflated with clear gas, almost 4 cm larger than the first day! It is possible that the other bag does not inflate due to some oxygen that could have possible entered the bag. Although the experimental conditions are very different from those that produce natural gas underground, this activity shows how the process can work.