Why would you create new technology with natural gas these days. It seems such an energy source of the past. Europe is jus suffering from the dependency on it and seeks to get away from it as soon as possible.
Agreed. Just electrify everything in the home, then while we still have natural gas then just use it for electricity generation. Natural gas's only benefit is that it is currently cheap, when that stops being true, then it is just worse than electricity across the board.
The great thing about electricity is that it scales REALLY well with new generation and distribution technologies.
So, you burn natural gas in a powerplant to create electricity somewhere around 55% (hopefully) efficiency; in most of the US, the heat output is wasted. You then lose 6% to transmission, getting to 52% efficiency, to put it into a 2x COP heat pump (which we mandate use gases with GWP in the thousands) to get 104% of natural gas heating.
Or, spend the same amount on air sealing reducing heating needs by about 30%, pay workers instead of factories, and get the same reduction in natural gas use, also without the refrigerant bomb waiting to go off, and not needing more power plants built. Mandate every rental have lower than 6 ACH50, since misaligned incentives mean they're usually worse than homeowner-occupied units.
Efficiency percentages are the wrong way to look at it. If you instead frame it in terms of tons CO2 equivalent, then locking in the emissions every year between now and 2050 is going to be worse, compared to the alternative of burning a bunch of natural gas for electricity now but gradually phasing it out in favor of wind and solar.
Europe is resource poor and suffering from a dependency on Russia.
55 billion cubic meters annually were set to be added to this dependency as recently as February 21st of this year before yet another land war erupted on the continent, forcing them to suspend certification.
