the.com/propane
the dinosaur that refused to die, now grilling your burgers in the suburbs
means A flammable hydrocarbon gas, easily compressed into liquid form, that's bottled up and burned to fuel grills, heaters, and stoves.
from A 19th-century chemist's coinage, built from the same naming logic as its hydrocarbon siblings: take 'propionic' (from Greek 'pro-,' first, plus 'pion,' fat — it was the first 'fatty' acid in its series) and swap in the '-ane' suffix that chemists hang on saturated hydrocarbons like methane, ethane, and butane. So 'propane' literally means roughly 'the saturated cousin of the first-fat compound' — a tidy bit of laboratory bookkeeping. The dinosaur part of the essence is, pleasingly, true-ish: the gas is drawn from natural gas and petroleum, themselves the slow-cooked remains of ancient organic life.
- odorless truth
- naturally scentless; the rotten-egg smell is added on purpose
- liquid trick
- stored as liquid, used as gas, expands 270 times
- cold customer
- boils at minus 42 degrees Celsius
- clean burn
- emits far less soot than gasoline or diesel
- hank approved
- a Texan cartoon made it a personality
propane cylinder camping gas — coleman propane canisters, standard camping fuel since 1960s
propane boom texas energy — marcellus shale natural gas extraction producing propane byproduct, pennsylvania/texas since 2000s