Natural gas consists primarily of methane, CH₄(g). (b) Write a balanced chemical equation for the incomplete combustion of methane to product CO(g) as the only carbon-containg product.

Video transcript

Hello everyone today we are being told that we have an incomplete combustion of natural gas and that that results in the production of C. 02 gas or C. O. Gas as the only carbon containing product. Were then asked to choose the correct balance chemical equation for the incomplete balance of ethane. In combustion reactions we have a hydrocarbon will have C two H six and we will react that with oxygen gas and in this case since it's incomplete, it only yields us ceo gas and water. So now we have to balance this equation. So what I like to do is I like to draw how much of each atoms I have on either side so I can keep track and know when to add atoms and so on the left, we have two carbons on the right, we have one, we have six hydrogen on the left and two on the right and we have two oxygen on the left and one and three on the right. The first thing we need to balance our hydrogen so to get from 2-6 hydrogen is on the right, we have to add a three coefficient in front of the water. Notice how we also changed how many oxygen's there were. So instead of three, we now have four. Next you need to change the number of carbon atoms we have on the right, we have one on the left TF2, we can simply add a two coefficient in front of the carbon on the right. Now we've balanced the number of carbons hydrogen and also noticed how we changed the number of oxygen's once again. And so now we have a total of five oxygen's and so we have two on the left and five on the right. We can multiply by a common value of 5/ To get rid of the two in the denominator of the fraction. And that is what our coefficient will be. But we can't simply have 5/2 of a mole of guests. We have to have whole numbers. So what we need to do is we need to multiply every compound here by two. That way we get the final formula of two C two, H six plus 502. It's going to make four moles of C. O gas as well as six moles of H 20. Leaving the last option as our final answer, I hope this helped, and until next time.