The natural gas industry consists of a variety of entities with differing functions. Following is a simplified listing of the types of companies that constitute the makeup of the natural gas industry:

Producers

These are the owners and developers of natural gas wells. They can range from giant corporations to one or two person well owners.

Processing

Processing corporations are comparable to refinery companies in the oil industry. They separate the natural gas taken from earth into its marketable components, mostly methane.

Pipelines

Pipeline companies transport processed natural gas to locales where it can be stored and later marketed.

Storage

Storage operators own and control numerous underground storage facilities for natural gas. The gas is stored for later marketing and, in some cases, as safeguards to be used in emergencies.

Marketing

Marketing companies facilitate connections between those entities in the industry that produce, process, transport and store natural gas and the retailers and end users who purchase the final, delivered products.

Local Distribution Companies (LDC)

LDC's bring natural gas to the end users via local pipelines.

There are three principal stages in the production and delivery of natural gas:

• processing
• transportation
• storage

The U.S. natural gas industry has about 3 million miles of pipeline of various sizes that provide natural gas to about 74 million customers. There are several steps in the transportation and delivery process as follows:

• Gathering systems are relatively small pipelines that carry natural gas from the wellhead, where it was extracted from the Earth, to natural gas processing plants.
• Natural gas processing plants separate non-methane compounds from the raw natural gas. These non-methane compounds include hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGL), water and various non-hydrocarbon gases. The processed natural gas is then sent to a mainline transmission system for further delivery.
• The mainline transmission system is an array of large-diameter pipelines that carry the processed natural gas to storage facilities and distribution centers.
• Local distribution companies use smaller diameter pipelines to deliver the natural gas to customers. There are about 1.5 million miles of these small diameter pipelines involved in this task.