8 March 2016
In this series, Corin Taylor from United Kingdom Onshore Oil and Gas takes a look at how gas is used in our everyday lives, and what the future might hold.
Developing renewable sources of energy is vital to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but renewables can’t do the job all by themselves. Ironically natural gas is needed to help clean energy sources grow. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that, right now, you can’t develop renewables at scale in Britain without gas.
There are three main ways that gas supports renewables. Firstly, gas provides back-up power. On windy days, we get up to a quarter of our electricity from wind, but naturally on still days we get almost no wind power.
At these times, other sources of electricity have to step in to fill the gap and the biggest source of back-up electricity is gas. Gas-fired power stations can be turned on and off, or up and down, pretty quickly, which means they can respond when the wind dies down. On Tuesday 19 January 2016, it was still and cold across the country. Wind generation averaged 0.3 GW, and gas generation averaged 19 GW. Without gas, we would have had power cuts.
On windy days, it’s a different picture. Two weeks later, on Tuesday 2 February 2016, wind generation averaged over 5 GW and gas generation averaged just under 11 GW. On this day, we had a lot more wind, so some of the gas-fired power stations could be turned off.
If you want to find out what’s happening right now, Gridwatch gives live information on how we are generating our electricity. As we install more wind turbines in Britain, the gap between wind generation on windy days and still days will grow, so back-up sources of electricity will become more important. We do make use of pumped hydro and interconnectors with other countries as a back-up, and in years to come, we will hopefully develop batteries and other technologies capable of storing electricity at scale, but until then we will rely mainly on gas.
Secondly, gas and renewables also play different but complementary roles in the energy system. Renewables generally provide electricity, but 80% of the UK’s heat comes from gas. As we decarbonise electricity, gas will continue to keep us warm.
Thirdly, gas is used as a raw material to help construct renewable energy hardware. Solar panels are a good example. Materials made from gas (and oil) protect and bind together the solar cells using things such as silicon rubber, plastic and polyesters.
So given how important gas is to renewables, it is not surprising that in many places we have seen gas and renewables grow together. In the US, between 2005 and 2014, US renewable electricity generation increased by 52% and gas generation by 48%. And in the 18 states in the US where shale gas is produced, wind generation increased seven-fold between 2005 and 2013 – accounting for 59% of the US total. Texas is the biggest shale gas producing state and also the biggest wind energy producing state in the US.
Together, renewables and gas have helped to reduce the use of coal and cut carbon emissions. Coal use fell 20% in the US over the same period, and CO2 emissions from electricity generation fell by 15%.
As we saw in the heating blog, gas is the most important fuel for keeping warm. But it also has a very important role to play in supporting renewables to generate the electricity we need to power our TVs, fridges and washing machines and charge our phones. We wouldn’t want to stay in the dark until the wind starts blowing. And thanks to gas, we don’t have to.
25 February 2016
In this series, Corin Taylor from United Kingdom Onshore Oil and Gas takes a look at how gas is used in our everyday lives, and what the future might hold.
What's the most important use of energy in your everyday life? If we really thought about it, some of us might say charging our iPhones, driving or taking the train to work, or enjoying a well-lit home on these dark winter nights. But it's a fair bet that many of us would say that keeping warm and cooking our food was top of the list.
And that's where gas is so valuable. Eight out of 10 homes in Britain rely on natural gas to fuel the boilers that keep our rooms warm and provide our hot water. Heating and hot water account for around 80% of our home energy consumption.
And most homes also have gas cooking hobs, which in my experience – having lived in homes with both – are far better to cook on than electric hobs.
It's a major logistical exercise to ensure that enough gas gets to 23 million homes, especially on cold winter evenings when we all turn the heating on at the same time. There are more than 280,000 km of pipelines in Britain that move the gas from where it is produced to where it is needed – that's around three quarters as far as the Moon.
So gas is a vital source of energy for the country, and it also has a long history. Our streets used to be lit by gas lamps, and our parents or grandparents will remember a time when nearly every town had a gasworks, which produced "town gas" from coal. Then in the 1970s, we started to produce natural gas, which is far cleaner, from the North Sea. In that decade appliances were converted from town gas to run on natural gas, and coal fires stopped burning. It was, at the time, a clean energy revolution.
Since then, millions of homes have had central heating – fuelled by gas – installed, boilers have become more efficient, and insulation has been improved. This means that we can now heat our homes to a more comfortable temperature. In 1970, the average home was heated to 12 degrees Celsius in winter; now the average is 17.5 degrees. But the amount of energy used for heating and hot water in homes has roughly stayed the same.
So what might the future hold? The immediate imperative is to reduce energy bills. Gas is around a third the price of electricity, but bills are still too high for many people. Better insulation and more efficient boilers will help to bring down heating costs – according to the Heating and Hotwater Industry Council, there are still 9 million inefficient boilers in UK homes.
In the long run, we will need to decarbonise heating. That will be tough to achieve with current renewables, such as wind and solar, which are more effective at producing electricity – there will be no heat or hot water produced from a solar thermal installation on winter evenings, for example. But we might be able to decarbonise heat by converting natural gas to hydrogen, and using the gas pipeline network to transport it to our homes.
This idea is no pipe-dream. A detailed study is underway in Leeds, and if it can work there, it can work in other cities too. So one day, we may be using hydrogen, produced from natural gas, for our heating and because burning hydrogen emits only water vapour, we would be doing the climate a big favour.
Our experience of using energy has changed a lot. Many people used to have to carry coal into the home to stay warm. Now we just press a button on the thermostat. It's easy to overlook where that heat comes from. For most of us, it's thanks to gas that is extracted deep underground and piped to our homes. Even as we develop renewable sources of energy, we shouldn't forget that gas, in its own quiet way, makes a huge contribution to our lives.
