Energy Magazine Category: Innovation

Gas heat pumps (GHPs), also referred to as thermally driven heat pumps, are emerging as a promising technology to enhance heating and cooling efficiency while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. By leveraging natural gas combustion to drive the heat pump process, these systems offer a resilient and energy-efficient solution, particularly in colder climates where traditional electric heat pumps face performance limitations.  

GHPs provide a practical pathway for homeowners, businesses, and industries to enhance the environmental performance while maintaining reliable and efficient heating solutions. This article explores the advantages, technological advancements, market potential, and policy implications of gas heat pumps in Canada.  

How do gas heat pumps (GHPs) work?

Gas heat pumps operate by using natural gas combustion to power a heat pump cycle. Heat can be sourced from the air, water, or ground, as with electric heat pumps. However, traditional electric heat pumps lose efficiency in extremely cold temperatures because their ability to extract heat from the air diminishes as outdoor temperatures drop. As a result, they require supplemental heating, often from electric resistance elements, which reduces overall efficiency.  

Gas heat pumps, on the other hand, benefit from an additional heat recovery process. They capture and utilize the waste heat from combustion, significantly improving overall efficiency and maintaining performance above 100% efficient even in frigid conditions. This makes them an attractive option for regions with harsh winters, as they can continue to provide consistent and cost-effective heating where electric heat pumps struggle. 

Why consider gas heat pumps (GHPs)?

Gas heat pumps present a range of benefits for residential, commercial, and industrial applications, including:

• GHG emission reduction: By maximizing the use of natural gas, including renewable natural gas (RNG) and potentially hydrogen, GHPs have lower emissions compared to conventional heating methods. 

• Superior cold climate performance: Unlike electric heat pumps, which struggle in extreme cold, GHPs maintain high efficiency even at low temperatures, making them a reliable heating option in Canada’s climate. 

• Utilization of existing infrastructure: These systems integrate seamlessly with current natural gas networks, reducing installation complexity and costs. 

• Compliance with future energy standards: Federal and provincial policies are increasingly favouring technologies with greater than 100% energy performance, positioning GHPs as a viable solution. 

Despite their potential, gas heat pumps face some barriers to widespread adoption: 

• Limited awareness: Many homeowners, businesses, and HVAC professionals remain unfamiliar with GHP technology. Education and outreach efforts are needed to increase adoption. 

• Availability constraints: While commercial units are available, residential models are still in early-stage production. Expanding manufacturing capacity will be critical for adoption. 

• Limited: Currently, the initial costs remain high due to small-scale manufacturing. However, costs are expected to decline as manufacturing scales up.  

• Regulatory uncertainty: While policies favoring high-efficiency heating solutions exist, explicit support for gas heat pumps is still in development. Incentive programs need to be expanded to include GHPs. 

To overcome these challenges, industry stakeholders—including manufacturers, utilities, and government agencies—are developing a roadmap to mainstream gas heat pumps by 2035. Key phases include pilot programs (2022-2025), expanded HVAC training and distribution networks (2025-2028), and large-scale adoption with improved product affordability (2028-2030).

Conclusion

Gas heat pumps offer a compelling solution for Canada’s heating and cooling needs, particularly in colder climates where electric alternatives may fall short. By leveraging natural gas combustion, they provide efficiency, resilience and affordability, positioning GHPs as a key player for a lower-emission energy future. 

The coming years will be crucial in determining GHPs’ place in Canada’s evolving energy landscape. Expanding pilot programs, improving affordability through economies of scale, and integrating GHPs into incentive programs will be essential for widespread adoption. 

Methane is by far the largest component of natural gas, which provides nearly 40 per cent of Canada’s energy supply. So clearly, it behooves Canadian natural gas companies to understand and minimize methane emissions while delivering this key energy source to customers.

Sources of methane emissions

Methane emissions occur in all segments of the natural gas industry, from production through processing and transmission to distribution. They result primarily from normal operations, routine maintenance, fugitive leaks, and system upsets.

Sources vary. As gas moves through the system segments, emissions occur through intentional venting and unintentional leaks. Venting can occur through equipment design or operational practices like the continuous bleed of gas from pneumatic devices which control gas flows, levels, temperatures, and pressures in the equipment, or venting from well completions during production. In addition to vented emissions, methane losses can occur from leaks—often termed ‘fugitive emissions’—in all parts of the infrastructure, from connections between pipes and vessels to valves and equipment.

For Canada’s natural gas delivery industry, “the majority of methane emissions are attributable to venting and fugitive emissions,” explains Christine Cinnamon, Executive Director, Canadian Energy Partnership for Environmental Innovation (CEPEI), an organization whose focus is to collect data to support regulatory compliance and tracking emerging environmental issues with a view to being ready to address them when they become matters of regulation or of public attention. “Vented emission sources include intentional or designed releases of natural gas for operational purposes, such as pipeline and station blowdowns, and emissions from pneumatic devices that use natural gas as a driver, as well as things like compressor seal gas and unit blowdown and isolation valve leakage. Fugitive emissions include all unintentional releases of natural gas, including above- and below-ground leaks”, she adds.

Cinnamon offers some comparisons to place these items into perspective: Fugitive and combustion-related methane emissions from TD&S (transmission, distribution and storage) operations form a relatively small percentage—5.0%–of the overall oil and gas sector’s methane emissions, and an even smaller percentage—2.1%–of Canada’s overall methane emissions (these figures based on the 2022 National Inventory Report and CEPEI inventory data).

Although TD&S methane emissions are a small contribution to the overall emissions from the whole gas industry, companies in the delivery business are actively engaged in understanding, managing, and reducing methane emissions, and have been for decades. Recently, the Federal government set a target of a 75% reduction in oil and gas sector methane emissions from 2012 by 2030. Industry is still trying to fathom the scope and implications of this target, as the whole sector continues its ongoing methane management efforts.

Managing methane emissions

“Efforts to date to reduce methane emissions in TD&S have included the total phase out of cast iron mains in Canada, the replacement of other aging pipe, pneumatic equipment upgrades, regular inspection and damage prevention programs,” says Cinnamon. It’s an ongoing process. “The sector continues to explore further opportunities that involve things like capture and re-use of vented gas and enhanced Leak Detection and Repair programs, including advanced monitoring technology.”

Organizations such as CEPEI play a major role in managing these methane emissions.

“CEPEI has been providing national downstream natural gas sector greenhouse gas, including methane, inventories and conducting underpinning field programs for more than 20 years,” says Cinnamon. “These studies improve emissions factors and the understanding of the nature of venting and leaks to identify ‘low hanging fruit’ opportunities to reduce methane.” Moreover, she says, organizations like CEPEI provide opportunities to come together as a sector in order to define best practices and share learnings so that the sector benefits as a whole from the work being done by individual companies and utilities. Additionally, this feeds into how companies make decisions on how to best allocate resources, as well as inform the government on what is being done and how regulations might impact those efforts.

It’s crucial that efforts like these be continued says Cinnamon.

“Through numerous field programs and other studies being undertaken by CEPEI, the sector continues to support improved quantification of emissions factors and their sources. Due to the very large numbers of individual equipment installations that exist in the sector, these studies provide valuable information that assists in improving emissions estimates and the continued reduction of emissions.” She says, for example, that current Leak Detection and Repair programs are achieving positive results and can offer insights for future considerations. Companies are reporting that the number of leaks and overall size of leaks have reduced year-over-year since implementing the program. The same can be said about ‘Call Before You Dig’ and other damage prevention programs. Damage events are a significant contributor to methane emissions from the sector but, with damage prevention programs, these events can be avoided.

But where emission sources or releases are temporary, intermittent, low-volume, diffuse, unplanned, or required for safety reasons, mitigation continues to be a challenge. Adding to the challenge is that costs of methane mitigation by the TD&S companies are already several orders of magnitude higher than the government estimate of $17/tCO₂e (tonnes of CO₂ equivalent), with estimates indicating the costs are upwards of $285/tCO₂e.

What is still to come

Canada’s objectives under its 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan include reducing methane emissions as a key part of reaching the overall emissions reduction target of 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. Achieving these goals will require current technology to be more broadly applied than at present, along with developing new solutions. Achieving deeper reductions of at least 75% by 2030 will require actions that go significantly beyond the lower-cost opportunities. For instance, this means a greater focus on the new and enhanced technologies that have been developed, including some made in Canada, that reduce methane emissions through electrification, fuel switching, efficiency improvement, and mitigating fugitive emissions.

 

“Canada’s gas industry is continuously improving its performance on methane management – while ensuring Canadians have access to the affordable, reliable natural gas energy they want.”

 

To help deliver more reductions, the CGA and CEPEI formed the Canadian Methane Management Coalition. Announced in November 2023, the Coalition is working to profile and support advanced methane measurement, detection, mitigation, and capture solutions designed to be deployed at scale in Canada from across the value chain. It will include sharing information and best practices to deliver the next wave of methane emission reductions. Importantly, it will also build on the work of Canada’s first emissions testing centre, the NGIF Emissions Testing Centre hosted by Tourmaline, Canada’s largest gas producer, at one of their production sites in Alberta. The centre is an industry-led initiative with government and academic support to help test new technologies and expedite their commercialization.

Canada’s gas industry is continuously improving its performance on methane management – while ensuring Canadians have access to the affordable, reliable natural gas energy they want. As we are called on to do more to meet new government emission targets, maintaining that balance is an even greater challenge.

Graham Chandler spent a decade in energy corporate finance and marketing management. As a full-time freelance writer, he has specialized in energy topics for the past 20 years.