[UFOFlyer]

The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2. Even if the power plants supplying electric heat pumps/radiators is natural gas, the shorter supply chain (only to power plant and not to every building in the city) go some way to offsetting extra emissions. Then you have the obvious benefit that once the NYC grid transitions to renewables there won't be as many natural gas ovens and heaters that need to be replaced.

The commenters pointing out that natural gas stoves don't have a significant effect on emissions are right, but once a building gets a gas hookup installing natural gas heaters and water heaters becomes more attractive and economical. That's something we don't want to be incentivizing

Climate town recently released a new video talking about this issue as well as the decades of marketing and lobbying the natural gas industry has paid for to neuter or outright kill legislation like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54

[varenc]

I lived in a very old SF house that had some original gas lamp fixtures. These are overhead lamps from the 1900s that burnt gas for illumination.

There was a very faint gas smell in the entryway and we eventually traced it to one of these lamps. Its gas line was still under pressure and it wasn’t fully shut off. I tightened the valve and the smell stopped. (Though also the leak was so small a gas inspector’s equipment couldn’t detect it, but some people’s noses could)

Agreed that running gas lines everywhere may not be the best idea. We were dealing with the repercussions 100 years later.

[Manuel_D]

> The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2.

This is only true in the short term. Methane has a half life in the atmosphere of less than a decade. By comparison, CO2 has a half life of thousands of years. Methane's greater immediate warming is drastically overshadowed by CO2's long-term persistence.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The GWP (global warming potential) which is what people talk about is calculated over the next 100 years, so "short term" is a bit misleading.

[Manuel_D]

Global warming potential can be calculated over any chosen time frame, some use a 20 year time frame [1]. One hundred years is indeed short term when some greenhouse gases have a half life of thousands or even tens of thousands of years.

!. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

[jabl]

My understanding is that in the athmosphere methane slowly oxidizes to, well, CO2 (and water).

So in the short term (whether you use 20 or 100 years) methane is much worse, in the long term it approaches that of CO2.

[sitkack]

Many of the nice qualities of natural gas is the much higher power output. Gas burners go up to 60kw (normal kitchen burner is 9kw) while an electric resistance stove is 2.6kw. We now have inductive stoves that can surpass electric resistance stoves in power output and can match burners more powerful than a typical industrial kitchen.

tl;dr the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over.

[Manuel_D]

I know that this is talking about household energy use, but one of the larger uses of natural gas is metallurgy and industrial processes (like making fertilizer). Industrial natural gas use almost matches consumption for electricity generation in the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur...

Changing these systems to use something other than fossil fuels is a big conundrum. In theory, hydrogen could replace it. But almost all hydrogen today is generated via steam reformation (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2) which emits greenhouse gases. Electrolysis powered by renewable power is theoretically possible, but scaling it up proves difficult. Some hypothesize that thermochemical hydrogen production [1] with heat provided by fission could produce hydrogen at the required scales.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermochemical_cycle

[sitkack]

We no longer need to deliver natural gas into cities to deliver power to a process, that was the original argument. Delivering it as a feedstock and or specific chemical heat source, sure.

[R0b0t1]

Running a small induction forge takes ~20kW or so, about the max deliverable to a house, so no. This output is achievable with gas.

[Manuel_D]

From the comment I responded to:

> tl;dr the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over.

This is untrue. I explicitly acknowledged that the context is mostly in household use (did you miss that?), but this statement goes too far.

[endisneigh]

I agree that we're trending to your conclusion, but we're not there yet.

You're kidding if you think the electric grid, especially in NYC, could handle the removal of all gas appliances and replacement with high amperage electric appliances. You're talking about an order of magnitude (or even two) increase in electricity usage.

[sitkack]

Not kidding, totally doable with batteries. The power density in hybrid car batteries is roughly 500Whr @ 50C, so max power output is 25kW. So 72s at max power, even at industrial cooking of 9kw we see 200s. At max home resistance heater output we see 700s of runtime.

We can cook with batteries and have better performance than gas right now. Which means you don't even have to run 240v to the range. You can run a high power stove top off any regular circuit.

[endisneigh]

Where will these batteries be stored? How will the risk of a fire be mitigated? What's the plan for recycling the batteries or dealing with battery failure? The infrastructure should have a lot of redundancy - I like batteries but I personally wouldn't rely on them in extreme scenarios.

[sitkack]

We are talking about a battery pack that is 100x100x600mm. LiFeO4 and other chemistries don't have the same failure scenarios. A home stove is not an extreme scenario, I believe you are just throwing up chaff and moving some goal posts.

[endisneigh]

I'm not talking about stoves, I'm talking about your claim that "the need to deliver gas to anything other than a grid scale powerplant is over."

It's just not true.

[micromacrofoot]

this is all stuff we’re going to figure out anyway, it’s already happening… replacing old appliances as they fail and retrofitting existing buildings will take much longer

[chillingeffect]

>recycling

Invest in ABML or several other companies :)

[CydeWeys]

> You're talking about an order of magnitude (or even two) increase in electricity usage.

You're way off on this estimate. No way would the energy usage of NYC go up 10-100X! Those are absurd numbers!

[endisneigh]

Electricity usage, not energy. Electric heat, even a heat pump, uses orders of magnitude more electricity. Of course then we save on the efficiency of moving gas, but that wouldn’t necessarily be NYC