Episode 9: The future of energy security: The role of gas networks

Future of Utilities Podcast 

The future of energy security: The role of gas networks 

Lindley Gooden: Hello, I’m Lindley Gooden. Welcome to the Future of Utilities podcast. Great to have you with us. Now let’s talk about energy security and the role of the gas networks with James Earl from Future Energy Networks. Great to have you with us, James – how are you? 

James Earl: I’m fantastic, thank you – how are you doing today? 

Lindley Gooden: Good, good. Tell us a bit more about what you do. 

James Earl: I run Future Energy Networks. We’re the membership organisation for the UK’s gas networks – National Gas and the four gas distribution networks in Great Britain. We also have the Northern Irish gas networks as members. The topic of today, the future of the gas network, is genuinely what we do every day. 

Lindley Gooden: I love that – you should be here. Gas moves faster than many other energy forms, and it can deal with peaks and troughs. Let’s talk about cold weather specifically. When there’s a serious cold snap, what’s the benefit of gas? 

James Earl: This is exactly what gas networks are designed to do. The stat I always come back to is that gas networks are 99.9996% reliable – which means you can expect an interruption to your gas supply roughly once every 40 years. Gas networks are designed to deal with peaks and particularly cold weather, built to what’s called the “1 in 20” resilience standard – meaning they can cope with the coldest weather conditions expected once in any 20-year period. That’s what gas networks are built to do, and they do it very well. 

Lindley Gooden: We know gas – but I hate to break it to you that a lot of the conversations at the summit today have been about electrifying the networks. So where do you think gas fits in? Is it just a safety net? Something that can react quickly and plug gaps, or something else? Where do you see the next stage for gas? 

James Earl: First off, I like to call it “gases,” plural, rather than “gas” – I’ll come on to why. We’re not just talking about fossil fuels here, we’re talking about green gases too. I don’t see gas becoming a safety net in the future. It has a fundamental role across a lot of different end uses – in power generation, when renewables output is low and the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining; in industry, particularly processes that need really high temperatures that electricity struggles to reach; potentially in transport too; and in heat. 

Electrification is a genuinely important part of the future – we’re going to see increased electrification across the economy, and that will probably mean we reduce our overall use of gases over time. But that doesn’t mean gas becomes a safety net. I still think it has a fundamental and important role to play, and the gas pipeline network we use to move those gases around needs to stay in place to make that happen. 

Lindley Gooden: I think one thing we’re learning today – and I’m sure our audience is too – is that energy security depends on integrating many different sources. That’s never been more important. And gas clearly has a big part to play in that. But let’s talk about renewables, and the different gases you’ve mentioned. Do gas and renewables compete? Are they in conflict, or do they end up supporting each other? 

James Earl: I’ll start with what green gases actually are – there are several. Biomethane is the one already in our grid today. It’s chemically the same methane as fossil gas, but produced from organic material rather than fossil sources, which makes it low carbon, or even carbon negative. Biomethane is about 1% of our gas use today. We’ve been working across the industry through a group called the Green Gas Task Force, with producers and end users, to build new evidence on biomethane’s future role. We think it could realistically meet somewhere between a fifth and a sixth of current demand – and if overall gas use falls, biomethane could become a genuinely material part of the mix. 

There’s also hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage. Neither is as advanced or as close to market as biomethane, but we’ll need them for some of the applications I mentioned – industry, and power generation when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The way we see it, the future for gas and the gas network is “multi-molecule” – lots of different green molecules, working in partnership with electrification. We’re seeing rapid rollout of renewable electricity, and gas taking a gradually smaller role in the power system specifically. So you’ll use less gas over time, but that doesn’t mean we rely on it any less. 

Lindley Gooden: It’s difficult, isn’t it – gas, like a lot of fossil fuels, has a PR problem. So looking ahead, it’s really about understanding the role of each of these – biofuels, blue and green hydrogen, and so on – and understanding the backup role they all play. Looking at the volatility of future energy supply, do you see these newer gas sources – not new gases exactly, but new sources – playing an increasingly important role? Is there a kind of platform emerging where you can balance what does what? 

James Earl: The best protection against volatility is using a variety of different solutions and technologies. If we relied solely on fossil gas, that brings real challenges. If we relied solely on electricity, that brings real challenges too, for resilience and security of supply. We need an all-systems, all-technology approach – using the full suite of green gases, not just one, alongside everything else we can bring to the mix. That’s how we get a more resilient and affordable energy system for the future. 

Lindley Gooden: So what does that resilience actually look like? Paint the picture – I’m sure everyone here has their own part to play in the network, but how do you build that resilience? What’s the bedrock, and how do you build it now so it’s fit for the future? 

James Earl: That includes managing volatility, a lot of forward planning, and other sources – nuclear, for instance – coming into play too. I’d start where I started this conversation: the role gas plays today, managing real peaks in demand. That’s what gas does exceptionally well. So if you start there and ask, in the energy system of the future, how do we make sure we can still handle those extreme events and peaks, the design questions tend to flow naturally from that starting point. Gas – green gases – should be playing that role: keeping the system secure, handling the peaks it’s already good at, and letting electricity and electrification fill in the gaps around that. It’s not about using gas everywhere, and it’s probably not about using as much gas as we use today. It’s about planning a system that uses these different sources in the right way, so it’s resilient and affordable. 

[This conversation is brought to you by Modulr, the payments automation platform. Modulr automates how money moves, delivering the efficiency, accuracy and reliability that finance operations need to scale.] 

Lindley Gooden: One thing worth raising, given the audience we’ve got today, is partnership – working with other parts of the sector to build a shared view on the role of gases going forward. How important is it to bring all those parties together to make this actually work? 

James Earl: It’s really important, and I hope some of the people watching this don’t actually work in gas – I hope some just work in electricity and want to hear more. Let’s do a show of hands, actually, for people listening rather than watching – who here doesn’t work in gas? 

Lindley Gooden: That looks like around a third, maybe closer to half. 

James Earl: That’s genuinely pleasing. My own career has spanned both gas and electricity, and we need a sector that understands both, and how they interact. I go to a lot of events focused heavily on electricity, but we need to be having this conversation about how the two vectors work together. 

Lindley Gooden: This brings us to something that felt important when we were preparing for this conversation. I felt quite strongly that this could be framed as gas’s final farewell – is there a risk we transition away from it too quickly? Is there a danger that if we lose the volatility management and day-to-day flexibility gas currently provides, we end up with real gaps in the system? 

James Earl: The starting point to that question is: even if we were on a trajectory to get rid of gas and the gas networks entirely, we are nowhere near that today. The reality is gas networks are still gaining more new connections than they’re losing. The gas network is growing – that’s the reality right now. Data centres are actually a really interesting part of this: we’ve published figures recently on connection enquiries from data centres to the gas network, because when they look at electricity infrastructure, they’re being quoted connection times of up to 15 years. That simply doesn’t work for them. 

So my starting point on decommissioning is that we’re simply not at that point in time. We have to build a system that’s flexible and resilient to wherever the future takes us – and if electrification accelerates, we need to think through the impact on the gas network and its remaining users very carefully. My view is that rushing to decommission gas infrastructure isn’t the right answer. It would send bills through the roof, and that’s not right for customers. Instead, we should be working in partnership to make the best use of the infrastructure we already have. 

Lindley Gooden: Something that’s come up a lot at the summit today is the need to look outside our own industry. Data centres are a good example of that. 

James Earl: They are – this sits at the intersection of AI use, AI policy, energy use, whether facilities need a local hub, whether that hub is nuclear or gas-related. There are so many different elements involved, and it’s genuinely difficult to have this conversation outside our own industry, let alone fully within it. 

Lindley Gooden: So how do you do that? How do you start engaging with people you wouldn’t normally speak to, to get local policy right? If we focus on data centres for a moment – they’ll use a lot of energy, if they’re built at all – how do you build a conversation that consumers can actually engage with, so people understand that a data centre isn’t going to drain all the energy out of their area? 

James Earl: I think we’re getting better at this as an industry. The National Energy System Operator is doing strategic planning, including regional energy system planning – looking at local area energy plans and what different regions actually want. So that outreach exists. I also think that as energy becomes more front of mind, more present in the media, it naturally becomes something people are talking about and taking seriously, more than it ever has been. One shift I’ve noticed over the last few years: it used to be almost entirely about net zero and decarbonisation, and we lost sight of the fact that there’s actually a trilemma – decarbonisation, affordability, and security of supply. As affordability concerns have grown more acute, and security of supply has come into focus given geopolitical events, that’s sharpened minds across the sector – not just on one point of that triangle, but on working with the wider public and other sectors to meet all three demands in the best possible way. 

Lindley Gooden: Final question, and in some ways the hardest, because it involves policymakers and regulators – what would you want to say to them? Is there a message we could all get behind, to make this work, and make it sustainable in the long term? 

James Earl: My message is that we shouldn’t be having a conversation about decommissioning the gas network. Not at this stage. The conversation we should be having is: what infrastructure do we already have that works? Our gas network is genuinely world-class. How do we use that in partnership with our electricity infrastructure to get the right outcome for customers? There’s a pretty premature conversation happening at the moment – that we’re going to electrify everything and the gas network will simply disappear. That isn’t reflective of reality. That would be my ask: to have this conversation in that context. 

Lindley Gooden: James, thank you very much indeed, and thank you for joining us today. 

James Earl: Thank you very much. 

Lindley Gooden: And that’s it for now from the Future of Utilities podcast. See you next time. 

This conversation is brought to you by Modulr, the payments automation platform.