We’re starting to have a national conversation about the role of natural gas in our energy future. A recent story from Maine quotes politicians from both major parties staking out unwise positions and repeating misconceptions about the best path forward to a sustainable future that provides affordable, clean energy for everyone. Natural gas is a bridge to a sustainable energy system when we use it to generate electricity, not when we burn it in our homes for heat and hot water.

If you have not connected your home or organization to a natural gas distribution system, well done. That saves you the hassle and cost of disconnecting and removing gas lines from your property. If you are connected to natural gas, you should start planning your pathway to electrification. As your circumstances allow, take prudent steps to remove gas appliances and electrify your home or organization. Once you are fully electrified, disconnect your gas lines and contact your gas utility to see if buried piping can be removed to eliminate the hazard.

About 69 million households use electricity to heat their homes, while 58 million still use natural gas. As heat pump technology improves and more technicians become proficient installing and servicing high-efficiency electric heating systems, it's becoming easier to upgrade from gas to electricity. For people who believed that heating and cooking with natural gas in their homes was environmentally beneficial, it’s disappointing to learn why that is not and was never the case. The natural gas industry has done a fantastic job selling their product (as Michael Barnard writes, “You have to give it to the natural gas industry, they have a flare for marketing that coal and oil must envy, starting with calling methane ‘natural’ gas.”). Despite the clever and relentless marketing, burning fossil fuel of any kind in residential and small commercial structures is not a winning strategy; to achieve a sustainable energy future, we need to fully electrify our homes and organizations.

Heating your space and hot water with super-efficient electric heat pumps—and leaving it to electricity suppliers to burn natural gas to generate electricity—helps us all proceed on a practical pathway to a sustainable energy future. Power plants that burn gas can provide electricity when solar, wind, nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal power plants can’t meet demand. Direct pipelines can deliver gas just where it is needed, not lurking below neighborhoods and downtown districts.

We should conserve our limited natural gas supplies for generating electricity and making materials, not for heating our homes or small commercial buildings. For water and space heating, electric heat pumps are safer and far more efficient than heating with gas. For cooking, the sustainable technologies are electric induction stoves, electric convection ovens, and microwave ovens. The resources we spend to distribute natural gas to residential and small commercial accounts would be better spent making our electricity grid more reliable and electricity more affordable.

A few people believe electric heat pumps are environmentally damaging because they falsely believe that burning coal still generates a major share of electricity in the United States. In fact, according to the latest statistics from the Energy Information Administration, renewables provide more electricity than coal. (We now generate 28% more electricity per year from the combination of wind, solar, and hydropower than from coal, which has become a minor and diminishing source of electricity. Annual renewable power generation first surpassed coal generation in 2022.) Natural gas allows us to replace all our coal power with renewable power. When the sun shines and the wind blows, we can generate lots of cheap electricity from solar and wind power; at other times, we can burn natural gas for electricity. With natural gas power as backup, the more solar power we install, the less coal we need to burn for electricity.

If we put more people to work installing more solar power and more energy storage systems while keeping our existing nuclear and natural gas power plants operating, we could retire every coal power plant in a few years. That is not an exaggeration—we really don’t need any coal plants to have a robust, reliable, and affordable electricity system in North America if we install more solar power and devote our limited supplies of natural gas to generating backup power when the sun doesn’t shine. Solar power can replace coal in just a few years because we can install solar so quickly: it takes less than three days to install a few thousand watts of solar on a home and about three months to build a multi-million-watt solar farm (although permits and utility interconnections can add several months to the process). Unlike wind power and hydropower, which are economical only in very limited locations, we can install solar power anywhere the sun shines.

A sustainable role for natural gas is to give us time to do the necessary work to transition from burning fuel to harnessing clean power: adopt better building practices so our structures are better insulated and make better use of passive solar heating, electrify our mechanical heating systems and our vehicles, install more solar panels to generate more electricity, and commercialize and manufacture and deploy better batteries to buffer solar electricity so we can collect it on sunny summer days and use it on snowy winter days. We need to get going with this massive project—natural gas power plants will keep the lights on while we’re getting the job done.

Building out new natural gas distribution systems and maintaining existing distribution systems beyond power plants waste time and money. We can’t afford to be messing around with trying to supply natural gas to everyone’s home when we need to reliably supply them with affordable clean electricity. We should invest in helping households electrify and remove extensive natural gas infrastructure that is an unnecessary, expensive burden to monitor and maintain.

Furthermore, piping natural gas to burn in homes and commercial buildings is foolish for many reasons. First, it’s dangerous. Natural gas is highly explosive and asphyxiating, routinely killing and maiming people after a spark ignites a gas leak. In recent years, gas explosions have “wiped entire neighborhoods off the map.” As pipelines age, leaks become worse, and risks multiply. Even if a leak doesn’t ignite, it can be deadly. As one natural gas utility explains, “Natural gas is non-toxic (non-poisonous), but can cause death by suffocation if the gas displaces the air in a confined space.” But gas is dangerous even if it doesn’t leak; burning it produces deadly carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide fumes. Every gas appliance must be vented to release its pollution outside to the neighborhood. Blocked vents or backdrafts can poison people, often while they sleep.

Second, natural gas is environmentally destructive. The main ingredient of natural gas is methane, a molecule that happens to trap heat in our atmosphere 84 times more effectively than carbon dioxide on a twenty-year timescale. The fewer chances we can give methane to escape into the air, the better. Pumping natural gas into homes and commercial structures is unwise.

Third, natural gas is inefficient. Every time we burn it, two percent or more of the gas doesn’t catch fire and just goes into our atmosphere. Because methane traps heat so effectively, this two percent of unburned gas has a bigger global warming potential than the 98% that ends up as carbon dioxide pollution and water. Of the energy released by combustion, some of it is lost as hot exhaust out the flue. Heating efficiency always remains below 100%. In contrast, electric heat pumps can move much more energy than they consume, so their efficiency can be as high as 300%. In a heat pump, every watt of electricity used to run a motor can push up to four watts of absorbed heat through the refrigerant loop. Even cooking with electricity is much more efficient than cooking with gas. Microwave ovens heat up water molecules inside food. Induction stoves heat up molecules inside cookware. In contrast, gas stoves heat up air; most of that hot air goes up and around pots and pans.

Used in the right place in an intelligent way—i.e., in an existing power plant to back up solar and wind power—natural gas is a bridge to a better energy future. But in the wrong place for the wrong purpose—heating air and water in residential and small commercial buildings—natural gas is a roadblock we need to remove before we can make forward progress on the pathway to sustainable energy.

References and Further Reading