Boom boom, shake the room.
Something that crossed my mind a while back, and has been bugging me ever since, is this: what rationale is there for continuing to supply gas to domestic homes? Think about it…it’s an invisible, intangible, yet highly volatile substance that we have to pump to our houses through expensive and relatively fragile pipelines whereby it ends up perfectly ready to escape through the tiniest of holes and explode unexpectedly, distributing you and your house over much of the surrounding area. If you do manage to keep it confined to quarters, best be sure that your central heating system is up to scratch lest the carbon monoxide snuffs you out in your sleep with the silent hands of an assassin.
If someone asked you to keep a couple of buckets of petrol or a crate of TNT in your house, you’d probably have to think twice before agreeing. But no-one raises an eyebrow at paying to pipe in an explosive gas which presents a serious threat to that very unraised eyebrow.
It’s not just a safety thing; surely it’s extremely uneconomical? There’s a whole infrastructure of pipework, pumping and processing stations dedicated to supplying millions of houses which must cost enormous amounts to install and maintain. Then all we do is set light to it to warm up a bit of water for our radiators and boil some potatoes for supper, all the while hoping our dinner isn’t going to be curtailed by a massive fireball and the sudden rearrangement of our homes into a neat circle of bricks around a crater.
There’s nothing here that couldn’t be achieved with electricity. Sure, the chefs amongst us might say that gas hobs are slightly better to cook on than electric, but it’s not that much of a sacrifice for a safer life. If baked beans could only be cooked by inserting a stick of dynamite in the pot, I think I could just about manage to cope without them.
In the meantime, if we must continue to burn all that natural gas – which at least will get rid of the nasty stuff – send it to gas power stations and convert it into electricity. That’s got to be more efficient than sticking it through the four tiny little burners on your kitchen hob, with half the heat warming your kitchen rather than the saucepan full of Smash.
And if it stops us having to pay an extortionate amount of money to a man from Corgi every time the boiler needs servicing, then all the better. Just what do dogs know about gas that makes their training so expensive anyway?
Thanks for the image from David Forward’s website.
January 24th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Now there’s an idea, as all gas suppliers now also supply electric, and gas is running out getting more expensive, perhaps it would be cheaper for the gas companies to phase out the gas and replace peoples appliances with electric and then they could use their pipe network as a conduit for the next generation extra high speed fibre broadband connections.
January 25th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
There is another way to look at this, however.
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
January 25th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Unfortunately gas distribution is very far from lossless. Quite aside from gas permeating through the material of pipelines (which admittedly is pretty low), there are considerable escapes from joints, the compressor stations, and the whole distribution and processing network. A quick bit of research suggests that around 60% of the total methane emissions from the gas infrastructure in the US is due to leaks at various points. The rest comes from essential aspects of the processing.
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.
January 25th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Hmm, where will I start?
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.
January 25th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Nope, we’re talking about the whole world. Let’s not limit this to the UK.
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?