Zero-Carbon Heat by 2030

It didn’t matter if you lived in Hawaii or the Cook Islands - but in the past, if you lived in a northern climate, you spent a lot of time shivering, and hunting furry creatures to make a warm fur coat.

Until we discovered how to dig the ancient blackened remains of 300 million year old forests out of the ground, we had only one fuel to keep us warm, and that was wood.

If we hadn’t discovered coal, we would probably have cut down what’s left of the world’s forests - and if we had not discovered natural gas, we would probably have killed off the North Atlantic Right and Bowhead whales, which we slaughtered in huge numbers for their oil.

So how will we provide the heat we need when we stop using fossil fuels? How will we heat our homes, make steel, or provide the industrial heat that’s needed for manufacturing?

It’s an urgent question, and one the BCSEA is very exercised with, as we work to envision a future in which our civilization can prosper without fossil fuels.

With fossil fuels soon to be history, humans have thus far developed eight ways to generate heat in a sustainable manner.

Heat Exchange
Heat pumps are a very clever way of extracting heat from earth, air, water or sewage, and this may be the main way we heat our buildings in future. In Mill Bay, on the Saanich Inlet, Brentwood College’s Performing Arts Centre is kept warm with heat extracted from the Saanich Inlet, even though it’s cold enough to kill you. In Vancouver, the Olympic Village is heated with energy from the sewage pump station. In Gothenburg, Sweden, 36,000 apartments are heated in this way, using a district heat system.

Stored Solar Heat
In the Drake Landing Solar Community in Okotoks, 18 km south of Calgary, 52 homes are heated by solar thermal energy, year-round. The heat is gathered in 800 solar hot water panels on the garage roofs and stored underground where there’s no groundwater intrusion. In winter, it is pumped back to meet 90% of the community’s heating needs. In Europe, the solar thermal industry wants to provide the heat for 50% of Europe’s buildings by 2030 - and they know they are going to have to invent new ways to store the Sun’s heat. Simply by building a passive solar house with built-in heat storage, you can reduce the heat needed by 50%.

Biomass Heat
We can burn waste materials from our farms or forests (or garbage, leaving aside the controversy), and circulate the heat to buildings through a district heat system. Using European insulated pipes, the heat can be conveyed for up to 50 km with almost no loss of heat, reaching a potential 8,000 square kilometres. In Sweden, which has a winter climate similar to Canada’s, 50% of all buildings are heated this way. BC’s pulp mills have used heat from their wood wastes to power their pulp mills and operations for years. We could also grow crops specifically for this purpose, if we want to or need to. We’d just have to eat less meat, to free up the farmland.

Biogas Heat
When a farmer collects farm wastes and processes them through an anaerobic digester, the result is methane gas, or biogas, which can be put into the gas mains as a direct substitute for natural gas. In Germany, a Green Party study found that biogas could substitute for 100% of the European Union’s gas imports.

Biofuel Heat
We can make bioethanol or biodiesel from food wastes, crops, wood wastes, or algae; we can also make “blue fuel” (dimethyl ether) by combining green hydrogen with CO2 wastes - and as fuel, it can be burnt to produce heat, as well as to fuel a vehicle.

Hydrogen Heat
Take some water, zap it with renewable electricity, and you’ve got hydrogen fuel, which can be burnt to provide heat. For vehicles, compared to putting the electricity straight into a car, this makes little sense since the conversion loses 2/3rds of the energy. When it comes to the extreme high temperatures needed to make steel, however, this may be the way we need to go.

Geothermal Heat
Most geothermal heat is far underground and in remote areas, so geothermal heat is generally used to make electricity. If you’re lucky enough to have it right under your city, which is true for most of Iceland, you can use it for direct heating. In Boise, Idaho, geothermal heat close to the surface heats 55 buildings, and is being extended to the city’s university.

Heat from Green Electricity
This is last on the list, since while it’s cheap and easy to switch on a baseboard heater, it’s also the least efficient use of energy, so it’s not something we want to encourage.

Will all this be enough?
We simply don’t know. There has never been a study of British Columbia’s full complement of green heat sources, and whether they could meet our needs, including buildings, industry and manufacturing. In 2003, we used 800 million cubic feet of natural gas a day. Even if half could be displaced by efficiency, that’s still a huge target to replace.

We need to study the possibilities and develop a complete green heat strategy, so that we can answer the big question: where will our heat come from when we stop using fossil fuels?

Guy Dauncey, BCSEA President
Author of The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming ($25).