Could heat pumps run on natural gas?

I looked into heat pumps, along with alsorts of other green ways of heating my house, generating power, etc.

A very pleasant woman came out from the County Council to run through the options.

My house is a 250 year old terraced cottage in a strictly controlled conservation zone ("World Heritage Site").

Heat Pump? Sorry - no cavity walls, no double glazing, insufficient wall area.

Ground Source Heat Pump? Same issues, plus the immediate geology is wrong.

Solar Panels? There's a south facing roof - which is ideal - but Conservation rules won't allow it.

All a little annoying, but no one can say I didn't go through the options..

The biggest single stumbling block was a lack of double glazing,and that's a conservation issue.

Single glazed sash windows throughout, along with every other house on the road.

I say "every" - but one house on the road (who replaced "modern" windows installed prior to the 1978 conservation order) has recently been granted permission to fit double glazed "faux sash" windows. One can't tell them apart from any other unless looking pretty closely.

I have French windows to the rear, which were also fitted before 1978. South facing, they're in a brutal suntrap every summer. I've replaced them three times - within the rules each time - with "like for like": Wooden construction. The swelling/shrinking is so extreme that they never close easily, and the wind fair whistles through them. Last year, seeing how upvc technology has moved on, I submitted an application to replace them with something more modern.

No go.

I love my house, and I fully support the philosophy of the Conservation Area, but I still get a little selfishly irked when it's ME getting the sticky end of the lollipop.

I am no expert on heat pumps so am not going to be making any argument one way or the other. But I have heard one criticism of them - aside from their expense - which I will relate, in the hope that those of you who are more knowledgeable about them can confirm, refute, or clarify.

Basically I have heard that the colder it is outside the less well they work and that below a certain temperature they barely work at all. Is this true? By all means correct that information if it is false. But if true it offers the prospect of insufficient heat available when the ambient temperature is so cold as to make heating most necessary. Which would tend to suggest a need for other back up sources of energy being necessary during cold snaps.

Who amongst you has one? And how well do they work in all weathers and temperatures?

I know someone in Mollendal (near Bergen, Norway) who has it in her apartment. I've never asked her about it (and I've never visited in the depth of winter..), but it seems to work fine.

Well in the UK, sometimes overnight temperatures can drop below minus 9 or even minus 15 but this is quite rare, especially so down here in the southwest. It has been known though. So a back up source of heating would need to be available just in case but would be needed very infrequently.

I must admit that working at temperatures down to minus 9, and even more so minus 15 is a far better performance than I anticipated. If you had said they stopped working when the temp drops close to zero it would not have surprised me. So I am impressed they can still work at much colder temperatures than that.