By Eyo Nsima
The Chief Advocacy officer and Deputy Managing Director, World LPG Association, WLPGA, Mr. Michael Kelly, has called on consumers to shift to the Liquified Petroleum Gas, LPG, as it is currently everywhere in the world.

Speaking at the just-concluded The Daily Africa Summit, he said the increased utilization of LPG would go a long way to achieving decarbonization.
He said: “There is a lot of investment going into renewable forms of LPG that will be the way to allow our industry to continue to operate in some of these more aggressive markets. So, this is a context and I hope I did not scare the pants off of everyone, but it is a very unsettled geopolitical policy framework, financial picture and the question we should ask ourselves and that I want you to think about as we go through this discussion – where does or should LPG fit into this discussion – and it is a very simple answer. LPG should fit in everywhere. Everywhere in the world has an LPG market, whether it is very sophisticated or very primitive it is a technology with no intellectual property challenges.

“It exists absolutely everywhere, it is a mature market, a mature industry that understands very well how to manage distribution and it is the only fuel that can make energy more efficient and reduce emissions across the globe. So, we like to say that if you are using LPG in the developing world and moving people from cooking on biomass to cooking on LPG you are decarbonizing. In the developed world, if you are moving people away from diesel to using LPG, you are decarbonizing and further than that, if you are moving people from using fossil LPG to using renewable LPG, you are decarbonizing.
“We can help countries reach their targets no matter what their level of energy maturity or what development stage they are because LPG is adaptable and flexible. It can be used absolutely everywhere. I am originally from Atlanta Georgia, which is the home of Coca Cola, the headquarters of Coca Cola and we’d like to say that LPG can be used anywhere you can get Coca Cola. I think we all know that you can find Coca Cola absolutely everywhere in the planet. So, that kind of flexibility makes LPG a real game changer, particularly in places that are remote or do not have good infrastructure. This was proven in the pandemic and I referenced it in the slide when I was talking about what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is something which is extremely attractive to policy makers. They know that our industry will continue to deliver providing energy to end users while at the same time protecting them and protecting our staff and the people that work for the industry. That is extremely important. We are also talking about using LPG with renewable electricity systems.

“One of the challenges renewable electricity systems faces is intermittency. So, there days when there is no sun, there are days when there is no wind because you can store LPG for the long term without any deterioration in the quality of the product. It makes an ideal partner for these kinds of systems, particularly in power generation. This is an area that we are promoting and there is a lot of money going into developing this technology. Obviously, as I mentioned before renewable LPG bio from Bio-Sources, some of them come from synthetic sources. We lump it all under the umbrella of our LPG, some of it come from municipal waste, but it offers an excellent opportunity to develop a product from different sources and also zero are low carbon or zero carbon product that we can use to position the industry for the future, low-carbon future. This is a message I want to send to you today.

“So, the global Outlook is quite complicated and the next few years are certainly going to be bumpy, but our industry does have a lot of built-in advantages not only the characteristics of the product, but also the flexibility, the adaptability and the agility to succeed. I want to turn your attention a little bit. I am going to tell you about who we are and give you an overview of what happened in the industry in 2021.”