I am also an advocate of heat pumps, but the gas heating should be preferred over the heat pump if the electricity for the heat pump, for example, is generated from lignite.
With pure lignite generation this might (barely) be true, but it is very far from the German electricity mix.
A few numbers on this, starting with electricity:
Lignite: 1093 grams CO2/kWh electricity, Germany mix 2020: 366g/kWh
Even if you directly used the gas to generate electricity, you would end up with just over 400g/kWh
[B]It is foreseeable that it will get better rather than worse.
And here heat (assuming COP of 4):
Using this electricity with a heat pump therefore results in 250g/kWh heat for lignite and 90g/kWh for the current mix.
Direct combustion of gas results in 200g/kWh. So at least twice as much.
It only really gets interesting in combination with renewable electricity, but it is interesting to see that from the CO2 balance it can even be more sensible to generate electricity from gas and then use it in a heat pump than to burn it directly.
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