Gas engine

A gas engine is an internal combustion engine that runs on a gaseous fuel rather than a liquid one, burning fuels such as natural gas, biogas, landfill gas, coal gas, producer gas or hydrogen. Modern gas engines are heavy industrial powerplants built for continuous duty, typically producing anywhere from about 10 kilowatts up to roughly 4 megawatts, a very different scale from a lightweight automobile engine. Belgian engineer Etienne Lenoir built the first practical gas-fuelled internal combustion engine in 1860, though it produced little power and ran inefficiently. German engineer Nicolaus Otto improved on the design, and in 1867 he and Eugen Langen patented an atmospheric gas engine that won the Grand Prize at the Paris World Exhibition. Otto's later four-stroke engine superseded the atmospheric design and became the industry standard by 1877, and British manufacturers such as Crossley became major producers of gas engines through the industrial era that followed.