I don’t mean just for any energy, I mean specifically how it burns, like on a stove especially, but also as an option for heating homes. that’s the tough part, cooking on a stove, but environmentally friendly. its much different thatn cooking on an electric stove, and all of the professional chef’s probably wouldn’t stop using natural gas as a fuel. what other fuels can we use as a good alternative, could hydrogen work? i’m not sure, because i think it’s burning is more explosive than a nice, steady flame.
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ok, look. there are millions of engineers and lab nerds that are trying to figure that out..
Any alcohol, primarily ethanol and methanol due their high energy densities. They’re very clean burning and efficient. Stoves that run on these fuels are already being sent to places like Ethiopia who need cooking fuel, but have no access to imported natural gas.
There is already one very good, efficient, and cheap stove developed just for purposes of burning idealized ethanol and methanol. The CleanCook stove, invented by a Swedish guy. About 1.5 kW per burner, which is just about identical to any common propane or natural gas (methane) stove.
It produces no soot and very low carbon monoxide (CO). The alcohols can be sourced locally from agricultural feedstocks and residues (ethanol), or even from landfill gas, gasified wood waste and flared gas from oil fields (methanol). Obviously, as any Hillbilly, Moonshiner and Rumrunner can tell you, alcohol is cheap and easy to make in bulk quantities.
However, also consider this — when I was little, we had electric burners, not natural gas. So you don’t even have to replace natural gas with another gas… just go electric.
there is nothing that can replace natural gas in kind. We could take propane and mix it with air, but most propane comes from natural gas, If we are stupid and convert coal fired power plants to natural gas, when the gas is gone there is nothing we can do. If we use coal, we save the natural gas forever.
H2 won’t work in our pipelines nor will “coal gas” which we used to use. If gas is gone, then the cost to replace all the stoves and heaters in the US alone would be more than the cost of Universal healthcare, ie more than a trillion dollars per year or $2000/per person.