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Who is using all the fossil gas? Where is demand coming from? Residential? Is it a common source of heating for private residences in some countries? Which ones

Who is using all the fossil gas? Where is demand coming from? Residential? Is it a common source of heating for private residences in some countries? Which ones? If these countries are signatories of climate agreements should they not subsidize (with help from those of us that don’t need it) the phasing out of it? Is electricity so expensive in some countries that burning fossil fuel for heat is cheaper than using an electrical heat pump? If that’s the case - wouldn’t a solution be to switch that around by taxes and subsidies so burning fossil fuels for heat is more expensive? (This of course assumes such countries can quickly switch electricity production if it’s using fossil to supply the electricity from renewable or nuclear).

adrianN 5y ago
Russian gas is what keeps large parts of Europe warm in winter. Retrofitting heat pumps into buildings is quite expensive, which is why homeowners are reluctant to do it.
- corty 5y ago
  The electrical grid also cannot handle all-electric heating for all households, at least in Germany. France is different because of their big nuclear fleet. Very often, green energy discussions forget that doing everything (heating, traffic, industrial processes) electrically needs an increase in electric capacity by a factor of 2 or 3 at least.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Luckily switching to all electric heating will take long enough to give us time to increase generation capacity sufficiently. Everybody except the politicians setting the targets for renewable energy knows that electricity demand will be much higher in the future when everything runs on electricity.
- michieldotv 5y ago
  Quite expensive? That's understated. My understanding now is that it comes at the cost a modest new house. Our family bought a house in the immediate periphery of a smaller city. Since most city housing here is old, the consequence of that decision is that our modest city home has abysmal energy efficiency. I have wanted to renovate ever since we bought it, in order to cut down on our carbon footprint before 2030, but I have given up on the idea that we'll be able to afford a heat pump before then. After having spoken with several architects, the building cost alone will eat up €200K without any frills. This will make our house smaller, by replacing poorly built annexes with a more compact and thus thermally efficient cube shaped annex. This comes on top of the mortgage that we took out. So ironically, in making our home more energy efficient, we would also be making it smaller and less desirable in this regard, at a great expense. Tacking on a heat pump and PV panels would inflate the cost by another 10%. That is the very real cost of making a home suitable for low energy heating systems. Don't get me wrong, I'm counting my lucky stars that I'm able to consider such an undertaking, but going through this exercise myself is just a reality check of how dire the situation really is. If we want to achieve net zero in housing, can we really do so at the cost of conventional building practices? Talking about the local situation, less than a third of homes are from after 1981 [1]. That's millions of homes slated for a similarly-priced revamp. Who is going to foot the bill? Even with government incentives, some owners don't want to spend all that money on something as intangible as low energy housing, and others simply can't afford to. [1] https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/building-stock https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/building-stock
  - adrianN 5y ago
    For old houses were retrofitting is not possible, a district heat network can help. But yes, housing is really hard to get to net-zero. What I don't understand is why it's still legal to build new houses with fossil fuel heating.
    - michieldotv 5y ago
      Talking about Belgium, 40.000 additional homes are being connected to the gas grid every year (2020/2021). That's astounding. We stopped mandating new connections. Great. Insidiously, though, Big Gas successfully lobbied for a price cap of 250 EUR for new connections to the gas grid. So not only are we still allowing new housing to be heated with gas, we're saying that that's a-ok you can do it on the cheap. It's almost as if politicians actively want their voters to feel disenfranchised. Who's going to tell those households in a few years that, "Whoops we made a mistake--so maybe this natural gas thing for heating wasn't such a good idea after all"? At the same time, households who are leading the charge in the energy transition with heat pumps pay full cost, get no rebates, and, cherry on top, pay through the nose for per kWh surcharges on electricity that don't exist for natural gas.
rob74 5y ago
In this case, burning the natural gas is the lesser evil, the unburnt methane that gets into the atmosphere is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. But of course, if you have natural gas pipes going into every building, that will also lead to emissions of unburnt gas. However I don't think the problem is that huge, because methane gas leaks are an explosion hazard, so it's in everyone's interest to keep them to a minimum...
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Yes, flaring gas is a slightly lesser evil. But I think it's the gas that misses being captured (even when they're trying) from the gas wells, the big pipelines and industrial facilities that are the real big problem sites for fugitive emissions. I read a report that claimed that properly accounting for fugitive methane emissions (which have tended to be massively underestimated) actually brings gas back to being just as bad as coal in terms of global warming cost. But coal plants do emit huge quantities of other nasty pollutants apart from CO2, so gas is still slightly better in that way.
hannob 5y ago
Something that shoudln't be unterestimated is vested interests in gas grids, particularly local gas grids. Lots of municipalities own gas grids or companies partly owned by the municipality own them. Your local major probably doesn't like the idea that this gas distribution grid which is a source of income for your town is likely worthless scrap in the not so far future. This is also the reason why some grid operators push for hydrogen heating, with the idea that at some point in the future the gas grids will be coverted to hydrogen. Most experts in the space don't think this is very plausible, because it's unlikely that such a huge amount of green hydrogen will be produced and using fossil gas based hydrogen doesn't really make much sense. Also converting a grid from methane to hydrogen isn't trivial, there are safety concerns and compared to a heat pump this is excessively inefficient. But if you own a gas grid you may see things differently.
stephen_g 5y ago
Electricity generation, residential (space heating, hot water heaters, cooktops), and as a feedstock for hydrogen, fertiliser, etc. production. I'm in Australia, and we export most of the gas we produce - mostly for power stations in Japan and other places in the region I believe. We actually burn more gas to compress (liquefy) other gas for export than we use for electricity generation or in homes locally. But yeah, it's really good to replace gas hot water, heating and cooking with heat pumps and induction stoves. Way more efficient and a good induction stove is just as good or better than gas (even though people who haven't used them will swear it can't be true). Heat pumps tend not to be able to fill your house with poisonous carbon monoxide (as can happen with gas heaters) or leak methane into your living space (which can be bad for a lot of reasons).
powderpig 5y ago
> Is electricity so expensive in some countries that burning fossil fuel for heat is cheaper than using an electrical heat pump? Yes. I can't remember the exact source but this charity covers it well. Up to 30% of Africa still burns kerosene for light. https://solar-aid.org/news/black-carbon-and-the-kerosene-lamp/ https://solar-aid.org/news/black-carbon-and-the-kerosene-lam...
AndrewDucker 5y ago
Per kWh gas heating is about ⅓ the cost of electric, unless you already have a heat pump. And fitting a ground source heat pump costs about £15k, so most people don't have the spare cash to switch over. We need government subsidies to make it happen generally.
- makomk 5y ago
  Also, the running costs of a heat pump are reasonably comparable to gas heating, so you don't even really save money by doing this. (Plus they're more complex and expensive to replace when they break, the installation process is really disruptive and not practical for everyone, etc.) On top of that, a lot of the electricity to run them is going to come from burning gas anyway in most countries. They mostly seem to have caught on in places where gas wasn't plumbed out to so many homes, there are good reserves of dispatchable renewable sources like hydropower, or both.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    A combined cycle gas plant has an efficiency of 50-60%, pipe that electricity into a heat pump with a COP of around 3 and you're well ahead of burning the gas directly for heat.
    - AndrewDucker 5y ago
      Only if you've fitted each house with a heat pump. Which is expensive.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Even I have trouble motivating the investment in a ground source pump in a really cold climate in Sweden. My regular air-water pump is around £4-7k and has a thermal efficiency (COP) of over 4 (so 1kw electricity is more than 4kw heat) and that’s with no digging or expensive installation. I get that there is no way Central Europe will switch to ground source, but regular heat pumps should be cheap enough to subsidize.
- fomine3 5y ago
spaniard89277 5y ago
In Italy and Spain electricity is very expensive, so many people uses natural gas for everything but lighting. And the situation seems that it's going to increase even more.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  How can it be so expansive? Norging stands out in the stats. Is this because people who use electric heating have old direct electric radiators? Don’t most homes in Spain or Italy these days have AC? Those are heat pumps so should be able to provide (some) heat in winter with reasonable efficiency. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    You're looking at the pool prices. That accounts only for 20-30% of the final bill people has to pay. The rest is taxes (and even taxes over taxes) and regulated costs, which by the way are quite opaque, despite they make some cosmetic effort of transparency. The rationale, they say, is that the spanish grid is "solid" and we rarely have problems, which is true but I don't know to what extent this explains the prices, or if cheaper countries do really have much more problems than us, which I highly doubt.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      What are some examples of final cost including taxes for customers? I pay 0.1-0.2€ per kWh after massive taxes
      - michieldotv 5y ago
        Electricity price (A) + Distribution network fees (B1) + Transmission network fees (B2) + Excise taxes on electricity (C) ──────────────────────────────── Subtotal + 21% VAT (D) ──────────────────────────────── Electricity price on bill Depending on the circumstances, (A) is inevitably dwarfed by (B), (C) and (D). It sums up to somewhere between €0.23 and €0.28 per kWh for a cheap energy provider.

adrianN 5y ago

Russian gas is what keeps large parts of Europe warm in winter. Retrofitting heat pumps into buildings is quite expensive, which is why homeowners are reluctant to do it.

corty 5y ago
The electrical grid also cannot handle all-electric heating for all households, at least in Germany. France is different because of their big nuclear fleet. Very often, green energy discussions forget that doing everything (heating, traffic, industrial processes) electrically needs an increase in electric capacity by a factor of 2 or 3 at least.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Luckily switching to all electric heating will take long enough to give us time to increase generation capacity sufficiently. Everybody except the politicians setting the targets for renewable energy knows that electricity demand will be much higher in the future when everything runs on electricity.
michieldotv 5y ago
Quite expensive? That's understated. My understanding now is that it comes at the cost a modest new house. Our family bought a house in the immediate periphery of a smaller city. Since most city housing here is old, the consequence of that decision is that our modest city home has abysmal energy efficiency. I have wanted to renovate ever since we bought it, in order to cut down on our carbon footprint before 2030, but I have given up on the idea that we'll be able to afford a heat pump before then. After having spoken with several architects, the building cost alone will eat up €200K without any frills. This will make our house smaller, by replacing poorly built annexes with a more compact and thus thermally efficient cube shaped annex. This comes on top of the mortgage that we took out. So ironically, in making our home more energy efficient, we would also be making it smaller and less desirable in this regard, at a great expense. Tacking on a heat pump and PV panels would inflate the cost by another 10%. That is the very real cost of making a home suitable for low energy heating systems. Don't get me wrong, I'm counting my lucky stars that I'm able to consider such an undertaking, but going through this exercise myself is just a reality check of how dire the situation really is. If we want to achieve net zero in housing, can we really do so at the cost of conventional building practices? Talking about the local situation, less than a third of homes are from after 1981 [1]. That's millions of homes slated for a similarly-priced revamp. Who is going to foot the bill? Even with government incentives, some owners don't want to spend all that money on something as intangible as low energy housing, and others simply can't afford to. [1] https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/building-stock https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/building-stock
- adrianN 5y ago
  For old houses were retrofitting is not possible, a district heat network can help. But yes, housing is really hard to get to net-zero. What I don't understand is why it's still legal to build new houses with fossil fuel heating.
  - michieldotv 5y ago
    Talking about Belgium, 40.000 additional homes are being connected to the gas grid every year (2020/2021). That's astounding. We stopped mandating new connections. Great. Insidiously, though, Big Gas successfully lobbied for a price cap of 250 EUR for new connections to the gas grid. So not only are we still allowing new housing to be heated with gas, we're saying that that's a-ok you can do it on the cheap. It's almost as if politicians actively want their voters to feel disenfranchised. Who's going to tell those households in a few years that, "Whoops we made a mistake--so maybe this natural gas thing for heating wasn't such a good idea after all"? At the same time, households who are leading the charge in the energy transition with heat pumps pay full cost, get no rebates, and, cherry on top, pay through the nose for per kWh surcharges on electricity that don't exist for natural gas.

rob74 5y ago

In this case, burning the natural gas is the lesser evil, the unburnt methane that gets into the atmosphere is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. But of course, if you have natural gas pipes going into every building, that will also lead to emissions of unburnt gas. However I don't think the problem is that huge, because methane gas leaks are an explosion hazard, so it's in everyone's interest to keep them to a minimum...

stephen_g 5y ago
Yes, flaring gas is a slightly lesser evil. But I think it's the gas that misses being captured (even when they're trying) from the gas wells, the big pipelines and industrial facilities that are the real big problem sites for fugitive emissions. I read a report that claimed that properly accounting for fugitive methane emissions (which have tended to be massively underestimated) actually brings gas back to being just as bad as coal in terms of global warming cost. But coal plants do emit huge quantities of other nasty pollutants apart from CO2, so gas is still slightly better in that way.

hannob 5y ago

Something that shoudln't be unterestimated is vested interests in gas grids, particularly local gas grids. Lots of municipalities own gas grids or companies partly owned by the municipality own them. Your local major probably doesn't like the idea that this gas distribution grid which is a source of income for your town is likely worthless scrap in the not so far future. This is also the reason why some grid operators push for hydrogen heating, with the idea that at some point in the future the gas grids will be coverted to hydrogen. Most experts in the space don't think this is very plausible, because it's unlikely that such a huge amount of green hydrogen will be produced and using fossil gas based hydrogen doesn't really make much sense. Also converting a grid from methane to hydrogen isn't trivial, there are safety concerns and compared to a heat pump this is excessively inefficient. But if you own a gas grid you may see things differently.

stephen_g 5y ago

Electricity generation, residential (space heating, hot water heaters, cooktops), and as a feedstock for hydrogen, fertiliser, etc. production. I'm in Australia, and we export most of the gas we produce - mostly for power stations in Japan and other places in the region I believe. We actually burn more gas to compress (liquefy) other gas for export than we use for electricity generation or in homes locally. But yeah, it's really good to replace gas hot water, heating and cooking with heat pumps and induction stoves. Way more efficient and a good induction stove is just as good or better than gas (even though people who haven't used them will swear it can't be true). Heat pumps tend not to be able to fill your house with poisonous carbon monoxide (as can happen with gas heaters) or leak methane into your living space (which can be bad for a lot of reasons).

powderpig 5y ago

> Is electricity so expensive in some countries that burning fossil fuel for heat is cheaper than using an electrical heat pump? Yes. I can't remember the exact source but this charity covers it well. Up to 30% of Africa still burns kerosene for light. https://solar-aid.org/news/black-carbon-and-the-kerosene-lamp/ https://solar-aid.org/news/black-carbon-and-the-kerosene-lam...

AndrewDucker 5y ago

Per kWh gas heating is about ⅓ the cost of electric, unless you already have a heat pump. And fitting a ground source heat pump costs about £15k, so most people don't have the spare cash to switch over. We need government subsidies to make it happen generally.

makomk 5y ago
Also, the running costs of a heat pump are reasonably comparable to gas heating, so you don't even really save money by doing this. (Plus they're more complex and expensive to replace when they break, the installation process is really disruptive and not practical for everyone, etc.) On top of that, a lot of the electricity to run them is going to come from burning gas anyway in most countries. They mostly seem to have caught on in places where gas wasn't plumbed out to so many homes, there are good reserves of dispatchable renewable sources like hydropower, or both.
- adrianN 5y ago
  A combined cycle gas plant has an efficiency of 50-60%, pipe that electricity into a heat pump with a COP of around 3 and you're well ahead of burning the gas directly for heat.
  - AndrewDucker 5y ago
    Only if you've fitted each house with a heat pump. Which is expensive.
alkonaut 5y ago
Even I have trouble motivating the investment in a ground source pump in a really cold climate in Sweden. My regular air-water pump is around £4-7k and has a thermal efficiency (COP) of over 4 (so 1kw electricity is more than 4kw heat) and that’s with no digging or expensive installation. I get that there is no way Central Europe will switch to ground source, but regular heat pumps should be cheap enough to subsidize.
fomine3 5y ago

spaniard89277 5y ago

In Italy and Spain electricity is very expensive, so many people uses natural gas for everything but lighting. And the situation seems that it's going to increase even more.

alkonaut 5y ago
How can it be so expansive? Norging stands out in the stats. Is this because people who use electric heating have old direct electric radiators? Don’t most homes in Spain or Italy these days have AC? Those are heat pumps so should be able to provide (some) heat in winter with reasonable efficiency. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  You're looking at the pool prices. That accounts only for 20-30% of the final bill people has to pay. The rest is taxes (and even taxes over taxes) and regulated costs, which by the way are quite opaque, despite they make some cosmetic effort of transparency. The rationale, they say, is that the spanish grid is "solid" and we rarely have problems, which is true but I don't know to what extent this explains the prices, or if cheaper countries do really have much more problems than us, which I highly doubt.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    What are some examples of final cost including taxes for customers? I pay 0.1-0.2€ per kWh after massive taxes
    - michieldotv 5y ago
      Electricity price (A) + Distribution network fees (B1) + Transmission network fees (B2) + Excise taxes on electricity (C) ──────────────────────────────── Subtotal + 21% VAT (D) ──────────────────────────────── Electricity price on bill Depending on the circumstances, (A) is inevitably dwarfed by (B), (C) and (D). It sums up to somewhere between €0.23 and €0.28 per kWh for a cheap energy provider.