Is LPG a good source of energy? Oh yes — on paper, it’s a darling. Clean, technologically mature, flexible enough to burn in almost anything that once sipped oil or chewed coal. It’s been around for decades, humming quietly in the background while the world busied itself with grander delusions.
In regions without stable baseload power — vast swathes of Africa, for example — LPG can feel like a small miracle. It’s quick to deploy, reliable, and doesn’t require a billion-dollar grid or the approval of some bureaucrat in Brussels. It simply works.
But like most miracles, it doesn’t scale. LPG has one fatal flaw: volume. There’s just not enough of it. Not by a long shot. It’s not a primary resource — it’s a byproduct, the bastard child of oil and natural gas production. Upstream operations are designed either for oil flow, where LPG trickles out as an afterthought, or for gas flow, where it’s again just something that happens to come along for the ride.
That means there’s no such thing as a “clean” or independent LPG stream. It’s a secondary product, dependent on someone else’s main business. That’s fine when you only need it for rural cooking stoves or a few industrial applications — but it makes a lousy bridge fuel for modern economies. You can’t build an energy strategy around leftovers.And what, exactly, would LPG offer that natural gas doesn’t already provide — except a smaller scale and a larger headache? It’s the same chemistry in a different bottle. The only reason it looks good is that almost everything else looks worse.