All enter into combustion reactions with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water vapor. In other words, many alkanes are flammable. This makes them good fuels. For example, methane is the principle component of natural gas, and butane is common lighter fluid. The second class of simple hydrocarbons, the alkenes , consists of molecules that contain at least one double bond in them.
Alkenes follow the same naming convention used for alkanes.
Ethene, for example is the two carbon molecule that contains one double bond. Because one of the carbon pairs is double bonded, simple alkenes have 2 fewer hydrogen atoms than alkanes. Ethene Alkynes are the third class of simple hydrocarbons and are molecules that contain at least one triple bond. Like the alkanes and alkenes, alkynes are named by combining a prefix with the ending 'yne' to denote the triple bond. Because carbon can bond in so many different ways, a single molecule can have different bonding configurations.