The core of my argument is that we’re pumping highly explosive gas into people’s homes when we could not be pumping highly explosive gas into those homes. The environmental factor is a mere sidebar.

I don’t have to assume that the gas is produced from fossil fuels because the vast majority of it is actually produced from them, but that’s beside the point.

My point is that if you’re going to use natural gas as a power source, do it all in a couple of places rather than piping it to millions of households. Surely that’s a more sensible proposition?

I *thought* that we were discussing the UK gas distribution network. That, so far as I know, is in a much better state than that in the US.

To get to what I think is the core of your argument, why do you assume that the gas carried by the current UK distribution network must be produced from fossil fuels? There are a number of other sources for this, varying from methane outputs from dung to hydrogen produced on site by solar cells.

One major issue with the methods of electricity generation that you have mentioned is that their peak production times tends not to coincide with the peak demands, and the energy produced is difficult to store in large amounts. The loss involved in trying to store this (I believe I’ve seen that molten salt is the most likely storage mechanism, but is very inefficient) would mean that this would not be economically viable.

On top of that, you’ve got the slightly more indirect economic losses from needing to build the whole specialist infrastructure for residential gas supplies. You’ve also got to spend more energy processing and transporting the gas for residential use, including adding the lovely smell that indicates you’re on the brink of a fiery death. Remember, gas can get angry…

More to the point, you’re still stuck with using a fossil fuel, and all the attendant problems and emissions that it entails. We have the opportunity to produce electricity through more friendly methods - not so with natural gas. Saying that we’ve now got even more new and exciting ways to burn the gas isn’t an answer when we’re dealing with a limited resource.

Carrying the argument on to the extreme, if you can create as much electricity for ‘free’ through sustainable, clean methods (solar, wind, tidal etc.), then you don’t care if you’ve got 90% transmission loss because it’s all free anyway. That would still be better than a perfect gas system which has 100% efficiency and no losses because at some time that gas is going to run out.

Gas distribution is essentially lossless (except when it goes spectacularly wrong, of course), while end-to-end electricity transmission losses are, I believe, somewhere around 10%.

Now that there are domestic micro-CHP units available, I’d be inclined to suggest that more properties should use gas, rather than fewer