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Power Earth Government

Norway To Ban the Use of Oil For Heating Buildings By 2020 (independent.co.uk) 164

Norway, which is the largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East, is set to become the first country in the world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings. The country plans to pass legislation that will stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards. The Independent reports: Vidar Helgesenlaid, the nation's Environment Minister, laid out the plans in a statement, saying: "Those using fossil oil for heating must find other options by 2020." The country advises its citizens to research alternatives to oil such as heat pumps, hydroelectricity, and even special stoves that burn wood chips. By some stage, the legislation could be widened to include restrictions on using natural gas to heat buildings. The Ministry of Climate and Environment said the ban would apply to both new and old buildings and cover both private homes and the public space of businesses and state-owned facilities. The ministry says the plans are expected to lessen Norway's emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by an estimated 340,000 tons per year, compared to overall national emissions of 53.9 million tons in 2015.
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Norway To Ban the Use of Oil For Heating Buildings By 2020

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    • Norway isn't only reducing domestic use, they're also exporting renewable technologies [slashdot.org]:

      The world's first floating windfarm has taken to the seas in a sign that a technology once confined to research and development drawing boards is finally ready to unlock expanses of ocean for generating renewable power...It is also notable because the developer is not a renewable energy firm but Norway's Statoil, which is looking to diversify away from carbon-based fuels.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @06:44AM (#54741079) Homepage Journal

        Smart countries have realized that fossil fuels are on the way out. In the Middle East they are mostly investing in tourism as an alternative, and in Europe countries are investing in renewable energy technology that they can export.

        Everyone else is missing the boat.

        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          Thing is, electricity doesn't work well in countries like Canada where the distances are vast The grid can't handle it, it's also more expensive then any other method for heating. It's why charities that exist to pay for heating ran out of money last winter a few months into the winter season, and the people who primarily use them are the ones who use electricity for heating. At 0.185kWh @peak those charities were out of cash by December last year. The winter season in most of Canada runs from mid or l

  • by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Monday July 03, 2017 @08:52PM (#54739291)
    Norway, which is the largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East, is set to become the first country in the world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings. The country plans to pass legislation that will stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards. The Independent reports: Top oil producers in the world are
    1. Saudia Arabia
    2. USA
    3. Russia
    4. China
    5. Iran
    6. Canada
    7. UAE
    8. Mexico
    9. Brazil
    10. Kuwait

    So the submitter already has no clue what he's talking about.

    Add to that, the title mentions oil, the first paragraph mentions oil and natural gas as being banned. The quote just talks about Oil. So TFS seems to be written by a fool.

    • Nailed it.

      Also, too, and either... heat pumps are a sound option where only electric heat is an option, but pale in comparison to gas/oil heat where available.

      • by jbengt ( 874751 )
        Electric "pales in comparison to" gas, but not in comparison to oil.
        Even electric can be competitive with gas where heat pumps can be used, depending on climate and local electricity vs gas prices.
    • So the submitter already has no clue what he's talking about.

      The submitter left out a key word. Norway is the largest producer of Oil per capita outside the middle east by quite a significant margin.

      But yes a poorly written summary in general.

      • That part was taken from the article. It's shoddy journalism on the part of The Independent, less so on the part of /.
    • by teg ( 97890 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @03:27AM (#54740627)

      Add to that, the title mentions oil, the first paragraph mentions oil and natural gas as being banned. The quote just talks about Oil. So TFS seems to be written by a fool.

      The article is probably confusing the terms "exporter" and "producer" (the US produce more oil, but consumes even more - Norway exports almost everything we produce), and "middle east" with OPEC [wikipedia.org]. Norway used to be #2 there, not sure if it still is.

      The ban is on oil furnaces. Gas is irrelevant here, it's not used for heating and cooking here - we mostly use electricity, generated from hydropower.

  • Norway has plenty of firewood. No need for all those forests, I'm sure they can spare a couple.
  • For those of us that live in USA, Americans call Parrafin Kerosene.

    And is shocking to me that people in Norway heat their homes with camping equipment. At least get a wood stove.

    • Okay, thank you. I was wondering why the hell anyone would heat their homes with that clear white wax (which is what paraffin is in the US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        What make all this confusing is that that white wax is what I'd call paraffin in Sweden too ..

        Seem hard to find what is actually burned (one page seemed to suggest paraffin and kerosene was basically the base except for grade of refining too.) Can it be that our old tractor could run on both diesel and kerosene? Or different depending on temperature? Or different between two tractors? =P

      • Confusingly, "parafin" means the same thing in many European languages (*including* Norwegian) that "parrafin wax" means in American English. So it's just a case of the Brits being the Brits.
    • by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @01:12AM (#54740273)

      And is shocking to me that people in Norway heat their homes with camping equipment. At least get a wood stove.

      Kerosene, in this sense, is basically the same thing as heating oil as used in the US northeast. Kerosene, Diesel, Heating oil, RP-1 rocket propellant, and Jet fuel are all closely related. The main difference is the specific fraction and how much control is put on some of the components.

  • How can a building heated by "special stoves that burn wood chips" possibly have lower emissions than one using heating oil ?

    I'm all for fighting global warming ... but surely there's no wave a wood burning stove is going to be as efficient and clean as using heating oil.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      Wood is a renewable resource.

      Also, when trees are planted to make the wood chips, said trees consume carbon dioxide. Trees and other plants have always done that.

    • by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @01:26AM (#54740305)

      How can a building heated by "special stoves that burn wood chips" possibly have lower emissions than one using heating oil ?

      Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean. They work by burning the wood chips at high temperatures in an oxygen deprived atmosphere. This produces significant quantities of Carbon Monoxide, Hydrogen, and other flammable gasses. These gasses move to the other part of the boiler, where they are combusted with forced air, heating the water. A portion of the exhaust gasses are then cycled back into the primary combustion chamber, where they serve to reduce the oxygen content and keep the chip bed hot.

      Because the majority of the energy comes from combustion in the gas phase, they are extremely clean and low emissions. What ash is produced can be filtered out relatively easily.

      • Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean.

        That said, smaller installations, like in a house, aren't that efficient, even though they've become much more advanced (with fans, lambda sensors and whatnot) in the last couple of decades.

        Instead, what is typically meant is CO2. A wood fired boiler will of course have much lower net CO2 emissions as they don't burn fossil fuel.

        When it comes to particulate matter and a few other nasties, smaller wood installations are actually pretty bad. Esp. in our cities.

      • Also relevant that if they are using wood from recent trees then they are close to carbon neutral.
    • by iamacat ( 583406 )

      How can a building heated by "special stoves that burn wood chips" possibly have lower emissions than one using heating oil ?

      Think about what happens with atmosperic CO2 during production of wood chips.

    • by pubwvj ( 1045960 )

      First of all active heating (e.g., burning wood, oil, natural gas, etc) isn't really necessary even in cold climates if the buildings are properly designed and you're willing to live in a slightly cool building which is better for your health as well.

      Second, burning wood when properly done is very efficient and produces less pollution than burning petroleum.

      Third of all the wood is a renewable resource.

      Fourth of all the wood is a tight carbon cycle as opposed to the millions of years long carbon cycle of bu

  • I know a lot of people with heat pumps. When natural gas and propane prices spiked heat pumps got real popular here in the Midwest. As popular as they were everyone had a propane or natural gas "backup" furnace. What this meant is for about 2 months per year the heat pump would run, 6 months the furnace would run, and the rest was with air conditioning. It just gets too cold here for heat pumps to keep up. Last I checked Norway was closer to the poles than us.

    Then they mention electric heat. I've seen

    • Norway has a long history of doing things better and smarter than the US. So yes, it's going to happen.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Sorry, but wtf are yoy talking about? Speaking as a Norwegian closing in on 40, I've never seen a home heated by a petroleum product. Almost everything here is electricly heated (abd power is hysro). Most homes in my area have a heat pump. I have a heat pump and a wood stove. The wood stove is never used, it's just there in case of power failure.

      • I did a bit more reading on this and discovered something interesting. Currently about 85% of Norwegians heat with electricity, the balance being oil, natural gas, and wood. I did not see a breakdown of how that 15% is distributed but it is quite clear that the plurality is from wood. So that leaves something like 10% of people heating with petroleum.

        What I also saw was that oil and natural gas use is growing quickly. It seems that electricity prices spiked in 2003 and since then non-electric heating ha

        • by teg ( 97890 )

          A couple of points - natural gas has not been growing as a heat source, it has always been irrelevant. Norway does not have an infrastructure for it. Oil has been dropping steadily for a long time. Electricity (cost: about 10 cents/kWh) is the main energy source, used directly or through a heat pump. There is also a large use of district heating, and some use of firewood. Usually not alone, but as a cosy supplement to the primary heat source.

          The electricity sector is not lobbying for this, this is cause

          • Oil has been dropping steadily for a long time.

            What has been replacing oil? The answer is natural gas. In 1980 natural gas made up only 3.5% of energy produced in Norway, in 2010 it was 20%. Hydro has remained steady at about 40% of energy produced. Those numbers are from International Energy Agency.

            Oil is easy to export, natural gas is not. The infrastructure to distribute natural gas may not be all that large right now but it's been growing for 40 years now.

            If the goal is to reduce CO2 production then continued growth in the use of natural gas is

            • by teg ( 97890 )

              I was talking in the context of energy consumption for heating buildings - the topic of the article - and here, oil usage has fallen.

              Energy production in total is a completely different cup of tea - most of the energy produced is oil and gas, that is exported. This includes gas, as there are many large gas pipelines [wikipedia.org] from Norway to UK and the continent.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Electricity isn't particular expensive in Norway: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s... [europa.eu]

          They are transitioning towards electricity for everything, e.g. transport where they have a lot of electric cars and boats.

          Heating in particular is subsidised. Some people get it for free as a byproduct of some other process. The government makes sure people are warm.

          • Electricity is not particularly expensive in the USA either.

            https://www.eia.gov/electricit... [eia.gov]

            Google tells me that one euro equals about $1.13. If the average in the USA is $0.10. then that's about 0.09 euro per kWh. Norway pays what? The chart is hard to read but it looks like about 0.16 or 0.17, with the EU average above 0.20. The US government makes sure people are warm too, you think we don't subsidize energy here? I thought energy subsidies were a bad thing, judging by so many comments on here late

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              The US allows far greater levels of pollution / health damage though, so of course it's cheaper. How much do you pay for health insurance to cover that? How much worse is your environment because of it?

              • How much do you pay for health insurance to cover that? How much worse is your environment because of it?

                Why didn't you look that up and tell me the answers? I can make big claims too without citations like that if we add up the savings on fuel costs that we can put that money saved towards better health care, and still come out ahead.

                I'm not making big claims about environmental impacts and pollution, only that without the competition from natural gas electricity price will most likely rise. As people see their immediate costs of energy rise there will be push back on the self imposed ban on natural gas hea

            • by jbengt ( 874751 )
              Based on my Illinois bill compared to your link, the listed USA average 10.41 cents per kWh (which you rounded down to 10) does not appear to cover some taxes, meter fees, and other costs, some of which are not charged based on kWh. looking at one of my bills, those costs averaged out to almost 4 cents / kWh in a typical, non-air conditioning month.
              So last March I paid 9.57 cents/kWh for electricity supply and delivery combined (yes, they're separate charges ever since "deregulation") but 13.4 cents/kWh i
    • by Strider- ( 39683 )

      Heat pump is a pretty broad term. All heatpumps work by moving the thermal energy up a gradient. The higher that gradient, the less efficient they are. Air to Air heat pumps do not work worth crap in low temperatures, such as what you have in the midwest. Ground source heat pumps, which I presume this article is talking about, are a very different beast. They offer about a 3:1 energy gain; 1 watt of electrical power in means 3 watts of heat out. Since their heat source coils are buried below the frost-line,

      • Ground sourced heat pumps have their limits. One of my brothers lived in a house that had a ground source heat pump where he used to live, and the house had an electric resistor backup heat. When he moved in he defeated the resistance heat because he didn't want to "pay that bill". He paid for it another way in a few chilly days in his house. I have to wonder if he actually saved any money by disconnecting the resistance heat, at some point the only heat in that system is coming from the (admitted large

        • by yabos ( 719499 )
          Here in Ontario Canada, we also use electric resistance for back up with ground source heat pumps. Some times we get winters with -30C or even colder. In these few days of the year, the electric heat can come on. It's a very rare occurrence most of the time. Your brother's system might not have kept up without the electric resistance but if it was sized properly then it wouldn't have happened except on the very coldest of days in the winter. The ground is always around 50F/10C so even in the dead of wi
        • It's designed this way on purpose.
          It would be too expensive to built a heat pump powerful enough for the few days it gets under say, -25 C.
          So the resistive heater is not just a backup for cases when the heatpump fails. It's being used to supplement the heat pump when it's too cold. As energy prices continue to rise, people will built heat pump which are more powerful and won't require/use their resistive heater as much.

    • As one other commenter has stated: It has more or less happened already.

      Petroleum for heating homes is rare in Norway. Pretty much all private homes are heated by electricity, with heat pumps being pretty popular.
      The ban on heating homes with oil is barely showing up in the headlines (I had forgotten about it when it showed up on /. - it is old news), as nobody cares.
    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      It's not just the distance to the north pole.

      The gulf-stream keep Scandinavia hotter than other places at the same latitude.

  • The Norwegian Minister of Climate and the Environment's current minster isn't named Vidar Helgesenlaid.
    But Vidar Helgesen.

    And as that is said, something more interesting:
    http://www.dinside.no/okonomi/... [dinside.no]
    http://www.ost-varme.no/starts... [ost-varme.no]
    http://www.husogheim.no/1/1_3.... [husogheim.no]
    Summarized: Assuming you already have a installation, and are a consumer, in Norway
    -Heat pump is calculated to be at 0.3-0.4per khw, but its still limited by how far down the pump goes before it can't supply(somewhere after freezing, some can

  • Heating with oil is a poor use of resources. It is far better to design the buildings to work with the climate. This is how I designed and built both my home and my butcher shop. Neither one requires heating or cooling to stay comfortable. Neither one is actually earth bermed either which would boost performance even more - both are strong enough to be earth bermed though.

    I live in a climate quite similar to Norway - I'm in the central mountains of northern Vermont. It regularly gets to -25ÂF in the wi

    • Which is fine if you're building from scratch. I'm not knocking my house down so I can build a new one with a more efficient design, and I feel safe in the assumption that Norwegian homeowners share my feelings on the matter. Nor am I particularly inclined to shell out the very many thousands of dollars it would cost to replace the heating system. I haven't priced that, but I'm pretty sure it would cost somewhere between "way more than I can afford" and "most of what I make in a year".
  • Sounds to me like they just told a lot of people they need to replace an expensive and vital part of their homes within only 3 years. I shudder to think how much it would cost to replace the heart of my central heating system, or how pissed off I'd be if some bureaucrat told me I didn't have any choice in that matter. Especially since it's so much cheaper than electric would be.

    And I'm way South of Norway. Norway is cold.

The more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain.

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