Chief Scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change backs Heat Pumps

The Governemnt's Chief Scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Professor David MacKay (author of the excellent book "Sustainabile Energy - Without the Hot Air"), wants to see an end to the use of natural gas for central heating and the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps that extract heat from the atmosphere (see original article).

“Setting fire to chemicals like gas should be made a thermodynamic crime,” he said. “If people want heat they should be forced to get it from heat pumps. That would be a sensible piece of legislation.”

Elsewhere in The Times we learn that, according to the National Grid, half of the gas used by British families to heat their homes this winter will be imported from overseas, the highest proportion on record, as production from the North Sea continues its steep decline.

 The UK was an exporter of natural gas briefly between 1995 and 2004. UK gas production peaked in 2000. Now we are set to import more than 50% of our natural gas requirements this winter and 75% by 2015.

Meanwhile, Exxon, to their credit, have been running adverts on television letting us know about new imports of natural gas to the UK coming from "the other side of the world" in LNG shipments. One country we're importing natural gas from is Qatar which, according to this article, is not developing its' massive North field further until at least 2013 pending the completion of an assessment of the field's resources. This comes after reports of dry holes being drilled in this supposedly massive field (see David Strahan's book The Last Oil Shock for more on this). The North field is part of the world's largest gas field shared by Qatar and Iran. Other Gulf countries such as UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman are facing growing natural gas shortages and are turning to Iran and Qatar for supplies. These developments, combined with a reduction in investment due to the financial crisis will only reduce the export capacity of Qatar.

Given the other profitable things that can be done with rapidly depleting natural gas - producing fertilisers for example, Professor David MacKay is spot on to call the burning of natural gas for heat a thermodynamic crime.