Green Gas in Australia: Real, Scarce, and Years Behind

The comforting story, and the catch

Green gas offers a reassuring promise: keep your gas cooktop, your gas heater, your familiar appliances, and let the gas itself turn green over time. No renovation, no behaviour change, the molecules just get cleaner. It is an appealing story, and it is the one the gas industry most wants you to believe, because it keeps your gas connection alive. The catch is timing. Renewable gas exists, but at a scale so small that betting your household on it means paying to stay connected to fossil gas for years while you wait.

The honest comparison is not "green gas versus fossil gas". It is "wait for green gas versus electrify now", and on that comparison the convenient story usually loses, because the clean alternative is already here while green gas is still mostly a roadmap.

Why the coverage is misleading

Coverage of green gas tends to swing between two errors. One dismisses it as pure greenwashing, which is unfair, biomethane and green hydrogen are genuine technologies doing real work in the right places. The other overstates it, implying your home gas will be green soon, which is wishful. Both miss the practical question a household actually faces: is green gas a realistic option for me, in my home, in a useful timeframe.

The coverage also rarely contrasts green gas with the alternative that is decarbonising right now: the electricity grid. Seen side by side, the gap is stark, and it reframes green gas from "the future of home heating" to "a niche solution for places electrification cannot easily reach".

The alternative, decarbonising live

While green gas remains a sliver of the gas network, the electricity grid is greening in real time. This is the live renewable share of the National Electricity Market right now, the clean energy an electric home taps into today, not in a decade.

This is the practical point: electrify and you connect to a grid already this clean and getting cleaner. Wait for green gas and you stay on fossil gas until a renewable-gas supply that barely exists scales up.

How green gas actually stacks up

Biomethane: limited by waste

Biomethane is biogas cleaned up to natural-gas quality and injected into the pipes. It is genuinely renewable and a good use of organic waste, but it is capped by how much suitable waste exists. There is nowhere near enough to green a whole gas network for home heating. Its best role is replacing fossil gas in hard-to-electrify industrial processes, not in suburban cooktops where electric alternatives already work.

Green hydrogen: costly and spoken for

Green hydrogen is made by using renewable electricity to split water. It is expensive, energy-intensive to produce, and awkward to push through existing gas pipes at high concentrations. Where it is deployed, it is being prioritised for industry and heavy transport, sectors that cannot easily electrify. Using premium green hydrogen to heat a home, when a heat pump could do the job on cheap renewable electricity, is widely seen as one of its least efficient possible uses.

The network-defence angle

There is a commercial logic behind the green-gas push that is rarely stated. Gas networks are expensive assets, and as households electrify, fewer customers are left to pay for them, driving up the standing charge for those who remain. Promoting a green future for gas helps slow that exodus and defend the network's value. That does not make green gas fake, but it does mean the enthusiasm you encounter is not disinterested.

What it means for your home and bill

If you keep a gas connection waiting for it to turn green, you keep paying the daily gas supply charge, a fixed cost that does not care how little gas you use, and that is likely to rise as the network's customer base shrinks. You are paying to hold a door open for a supply that may not arrive at household scale for a long time.

Electrifying with efficient appliances, by contrast, taps the grid that is already greening live, and for low-gas-use homes it removes that standing charge entirely once you disconnect. The cleaner outcome and the cheaper outcome point the same way for most households, which is the opposite of what the green-gas story implies.

The insider detail: green hydrogen for heat wastes most of the energy

Here is the physics the marketing skips. To heat your home with green hydrogen, renewable electricity is used to make hydrogen, which is then transported and burned, and a large share of the original energy is lost at each step. Feed that same renewable electricity straight into a heat pump and it delivers several units of heat for every unit of electricity, because a heat pump moves heat rather than making it. The result is that heating with green hydrogen can use roughly five to six times more renewable electricity than simply running a heat pump on that electricity directly. For home heating, green gas is not just slower and dearer, it is a profligate use of the very renewable energy it depends on, which is exactly why energy analysts steer households toward electrification and reserve green gas for the industrial jobs electrification cannot do.

What you should actually do

Do not base a household decision on green gas arriving in time. If you are renovating, replacing an appliance or building, plan for an electric home with efficient heat-pump hot water and heating, which taps the grid that is already greening and usually costs less to run. For a low-gas-use household, working toward full electrification and disconnecting gas removes the standing charge that green gas would never lower.

Treat "greener gas" offers with care: confirm whether they supply actual renewable gas or simply buy offsets on fossil gas. And whichever way you go, make sure your electricity plan is competitive against the regulated reference price, since an electric home's running cost depends on it. In WA and the NT, gas and electricity markets differ from the National Electricity Market states.

Why this matters now

With gas prices volatile and states actively encouraging electrification, the window in which "wait for green gas" looks reasonable is closing. Renewable gas will have an important role in industry, but for homes the cleaner, cheaper option is already connected and getting greener by the year. Recognising that green gas is real but not your realistic household path is what keeps you from paying to wait for a future that electrification has already overtaken.