The great importance that natural gas has for Italy has been discussed for several years now. Politics and businesses are discussing how to make supplies safer, how to increase their quantity, and possible new suppliers. However, if the great importance of gas is a well-established concept among operators, perhaps it is not the same for non-experts, i.e. for the vast majority of people who consume gas every day. For end users, gas still essentially means cooking food and, in some cases, heating. Naturally, gas is not only used for this and its importance extends to much wider fields than those previously mentioned, although important.
First, gas plays a central role in electricity generation. After Italy's exit from nuclear power, with oil and coal blocked due to their high emissions, natural gas, together with renewables, has become the fuel par excellence for Italian power plants. In fact, natural gas is the fossil fuel with the lowest CO2 emissions, with the highest efficiency in production and furthermore it is characterized by a great flexibility of use: unlike coal and nuclear power, gas plants can be lit and extinguished with relative ease. All these features have meant that since the late 90s, the vast majority of old oil and coal-fired power plants have been replaced by modern gas-fired combined cycle power plants. Today, power plants absorb as much as 35% of all gas consumed in Italy: more than half of the electricity produced in Italy uses gas as fuel. In other words, if we look at the light bulbs lit in our homes, 50% run on gas, mainly Russian and North African gas. This image, perhaps more than a thousand graphs or tables, gives an idea of the importance of gas for our country and how critical the issue of dependence is. With the rethinking of the nuclear option, the role of gas in electricity generation will most likely increase.
Natural gas is also of fundamental importance for many industrial sectors in our country. We are talking about those sectors that require a high amount of heat in their production processes: for example, bricks, paper, metals, glass, plaster and ceramics. Obviously, these are sectors of great importance and strategic for the country: just to give an order of magnitude, they generate almost 7% of the Italian GDP. In the past, the industries of these sectors mainly used fuel oil boilers, but the obligations of the Kyoto protocol, on the one hand, and the greater efficiency of gas, on the other, have led to the use of the latter fuel. To date, industry consumes around 30% of the gas used in Italy. It is not entirely clear what the future dynamics could be as two conflicting trends are colliding. On the one hand, many small and medium-sized enterprises, driven by increasing attention to costs, are replacing obsolete boilers with modern gas appliances. On the other hand, the high costs of energy in Italy, including gas, are putting increasing pressure on the energy-intensive sectors, whose companies are often forced to make a difficult choice between closing or relocating. Unfortunately, it seems that the second phenomenon is more intense than the first.
Residential and commercial customers represent 35% of national consumption. The uses are essentially cooking, the production of domestic hot water and heating. In recent years, especially the latter two have grown, driven by the replacement of old oil boilers and electric boilers with modern condensing boilers. To date, the growth spaces for residential uses do not seem very large. Surely there remains a not insignificant margin for the replacement of old heating appliances, but these are balanced by a series of certainly not favorable factors, in particular:
- Poor demographic growth of the Italian population
- Competition from alternative technologies, especially heat pumps and solar thermal
- Development of energy efficiency
