We use natural gas in over powerplant and in our heating plants at my work. I wouldn't change it to any other fuels out there. Sure natural gas is fosil fuel, but it's one of the lesser poluting ones of those. In the magnitute of 100 GWh which our district heating network produces energy yearly (and we are small town), there isen't really that much choises than to use fosil fuels. So why not using those which are actually cleaner than LFO or HFO or coal?
What is IMO the best feature of natural gas is the carefree and easy operation of it. Gas flows and burners runs smoothly. During my career we have had none breakdown in any of our plants due natural gas. It's clean to use as it causes no ash and the uniform quality of it makes it burn smoothly. Thus we have small heating plants, mostly old and in othervice rabidly needing overhauling (bloody company of ours doesen't give us enough resources to fix them
, but thats another story) running unmanned automatically all the time. Having similar plants burning wood, peat or oil, you would have far more intense failure cycle and would tie up alot more manpower to operate them.
We use Siperian gas, which is unlike the european or american gases alot "cleaner" 98% methane. Despite general belives, the suply of the gas from siperia is quite carefree, there have been only one incidence where the flown of gas was temporarely cut down to Finland due some valveproplems in Russian side.
As for using natural gas or LNG to fuel motors, I've only experienced with using natural gas driven cars. We had one in my former job. It was like normal bensin driven gas but it had very small bensin tank and bigger gastank. The radius of the car was pretty much similar to normal bensin driven car but the proplem was that there weren't that much of petrolstations where you could fill it up with natural gas (we had our own system to fill it up taken directly from the gasline of our plants). Rule of thump is that one cubic meter of naturalgas equals the heatvalue of one litre of LFO.