Historical Dutch and British gas grid transitions
Author: Niall Kerr
In both the Netherlands and the UK, the vast majority of buildings are connected to a national gas grid. Since the 1960s natural gas has been the heating fuel of choice and these grids have spread to cover everywhere but the most remote regions.
Although natural gas was first exploited in the Netherlands in the 1940s and 50s, the discovery of a huge reserve in the Groningen Field in 1959 instigated the deployment of a national gas transmission system. Inspired by the Dutch discoveries, the UK Government granted exploration licenses for the UK Continental Shelf in the 1960s with the first major discovery occurring in 1965 off the coast of Norfolk.
Prior to these discoveries, in both the Netherlands and the UK there was some existing gas infrastructure with ‘city gas’ (the Netherlands) or ‘town gas’ (UK) grids distributing manufactured gas - synthetically produced using coal or oil gasification - to millions of users. This gas was locally manufactured and piped to homes and business via municipally owned distribution systems. It was stored in large gasometers, the remains of which can still be seen on the skyline of some British cities. In both countries at this time, gas was mainly used for cooking and hot water with only a small amount for space heating (open coal fires or stoves were the main source of space heating). The newly discovered reserves of natural gas were considered so superior to the manufactured gas that both governments decided to invest in the re-purposing of existing gas infrastructure and the development of new infrastructure in order to deliver the new gas to homes and businesses.
In the Netherlands, a public–private partnership (‘Gasunie’) between the Dutch state (50%), Shell (25%) and ExxonMobil (25%) was founded to transmit and sell the gas. The delivery programme in Britain was coordinated solely by public bodies, the Gas Council and the 12 regional Area Boards (the distribution bodies for town gas). Both countries, took the approach of either co-opting incumbent interests into the new regime (UK Area Boards) or compensating them (Dutch State Mines). The transition in Britain has been described as centrally coordinated and state led, while the Dutch transition is seen as more state induced involving significant commercial interests. The collaborative approach between the Dutch Authorities and the private sector was considered a common feature of Dutch governance at this time.
The move to natural gas heating in both countries was predicated on market and service expansion as the new fuel connected to many more millions of homes and its introduction coincided with the proliferation of central heating. These changes helped to ensure the legitimacy of the overall transition.
The historical precedent of gas grid transition has at times been used to rationalise the potential future re-purposing of natural gas grids to run on a low carbon gas such as hydrogen. While these experiences suggest that wholesale changes in heat infrastructure are technically possible there are some significant contextual differences between now and then. Perhaps the greatest difference relates to that of the fuel. Natural gas was vastly superior, in terms of cost, thermal capacity and toxicity to the manufactured gases it replaced. Hydrogen, the most commonly referenced potential future low carbon gas, is more toxic, less thermally dense and currently much more expensive than natural gas (indeed, town gas was 50% hydrogen). While both historical transitions involved a central role for the state, modern day Dutch and British energy sectors have been subject to market liberalisation policies, with sector leadership now involving numerous, privately-owned often multi-national companies. In the Going Dutch project we seek to look in detail at the existing governance arrangements for heat decarbonisation and natural gas phase-out in the UK and the Netherlands. Their contextual similarities – reliance on a natural gas grid and targeting of net zero GHG emissions – provide a useful base for lesson drawing on how such a substantial challenge should be governed.
This blog is informed by the ClimateXChange report ‘Energy technology phase-out: Using international analogues to inform ‘net zero’ heat decarbonisation policy’ co-authored by Dr Niall Kerr and Dr Mark Winskel.
