Energy Transportation Group (ETG) has formed a consortium of leading international LP gas (LPG) corporations, with support from the World LP Gas Association and international public-sector aid sources, to devise large-scale solutions for making LPG widely accessible to, reliable for, and affordable by bottom-of-the-pyramid households. The initial focus is sub-Saharan Africa. LPG is among the cleanest and most efficient (by weight and volume) of all portable cooking fuels.
ETG is a privately held, multinational energy logistics and infrastructure project development company that partners with host governments, NGOs and major corporations to expand clean energy access worldwide.
Contact Information
Our Focus
ETG and its partners are actively studying how to create self-sustaining, large-scale markets in sub-Saharan Africa for distribution of LPG fuel and associated equipment to bottom-of-pyramid (BOP) households, through public-private partnerships. The ETG consortium's goal is to make LPG and associated LPG cooking equipment an affordable, preferential part of the fuel mix for as many as 100 million new BOP households within the next 5-10 years.
Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas
ETG has been involved in energy-access projects as well as health sector projects in many developing countries for four decades. This includes creating large-scale greenfield fuel distribution industries in cooperation with local commercial partners and/or host governments. ETG views adapting to social and cultural requirements as critical. As a commercial enterprise, ETG (and its industry partners) know from long experience that any solution, even with the most supportive possible policy environment, will be ineffective if it is not adopted and valued by the intended beneficiaries, consistent with social and cultural norms and real consumer needs and aspirations. This means that solutions must be designed from the end-user's needs backwards, not from an engineer's ideas forwards. Further, because ETG and its partners have typically taken long term (20+ year) investment positions in developing-country projects, results are continually monitored and tracked against project goals, including end-user adoption goals, and project contents and deliverables are adjusted over time in response.
Encouragingly, the findings of recent preliminary market studies of sub-Saharan BOP consumers suggest that LPG is well known to them, even if they do not use it themselves, and that LPG and associated cooking equipment would be readily adopted, if the fuel and equipment were made sufficiently affordable and supply (LPG refills) were made consistently available.
ETG (and its industry partners) have many decades of experience, working in concert with host governments, NGOs, and other key partner and stakeholder organizations, in developing new markets and new supply and distribution chains, and significantly expanding existing markets, for clean fuels in developing countries. The World LP Gas Association (WLPGA)*, which is supporting the ETG-led initiative, has similarly deep experience in helping countries and regions shift entire populations to clean-burning LPG from less "healthy" fuels. This experience includes creating the necessary, self-sustaining affordability and accessibility solution sets that permit poorer households to add LPG to their fuel mix for the greatest overall health, environmental, labor-time and economic benefit.
[* WLPGA is already affiliated with PCIA.]
ETG, its partners and the WLPGA have been active in setting and promoting standards for product performance, safety, quality, interoperability, ethics and business practices in every market served. A core mission of the WLPGA is to educate all key stakeholders regarding standards and best practices at every link along the entire value chain.
Solving the negative health (and often safety) consequences of the use of other, historically more affordable or available fuels in developing countries is a prime motivator for ETG and its partners in attempting to bring affordable LPG on a large scale to bottom-of-pyramid households for the long term. The WLPGA worked early on with health-monitoring leaders (for example, Kirk Smith of UC Berkeley) to study and understand the positive health effects from households' switching to clean-burning LPG, and ETG and its project partners have continued this.
Relevant Publications or Studies
None which may be shared publicly at this time.
Our Contribution to the Partnership
Initially, ETG anticipates contributing management skills and large-scale project experience, as described above, to appropriate working and strategy-setting groups. ETG hopes to ensure that LPG and associated technologies are understood sufficiently and are therefore incorporated in the best possible way as a piece of the solution-set to the indoor air quality problem, and to the many other social and environmental problems that stem from poorer households' limited present choices for cooking fuels and equipment (and access to associated education). ETG and its partners hope likewise to benefit from the deep and broad learning, skills and experiences of other PCIA member organizations.
