An African LPG roadmap is to be launched with the aim of fostering a greater understanding of what is needed in specific locations around the continent
Little clarity has emerged yet on how all of the funding pledges, initiatives and projects announced at the IEA's African clean cooking summit last month will be mobilised and monitored. But clean cooking's growing standing on the global agenda means it is likely to feature prominently at the forthcoming G20 and Cop 29 meetings on 18-19 and 11-22 November, hopefully preventing momentum from being lost.
The World Liquid Gas Association's (WLGA) LPG Week in Cape Town, South Africa, will straddle both events over 18-22 November, and will have a strong clean cooking bent. The WLGA has collaborated with the IEA and other stakeholders in orchestrating last month's summit, and will continue to do so in the various endeavours arising in its aftermath. With this in mind, the association has established the Cooking For Life Africa Task Force (CFLA) to represent the industry, pooling the likes of TotalEnergies, Equinor, Petredec, Oryx Energies and S&P Global.
The CFLA will communicate what the LPG industry is doing and the benefits it is providing in the region, WLGA chief advocacy officer Michael Kelly says. One of the force's first tasks will be to develop an "African LPG Roadmap", to be launched at Cop 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Primarily for policy makers and development agencies, the roadmap will establish the LPG market conditions in each sub-Saharan African country, "highlighting things like the number of cylinders, the regulatory architecture, challenges such as any infrastructure bottlenecks", Kelly says.
The hope is that through better analysis and information sharing, a greater understanding of what is needed in specific locations will emerge, allowing investment to be channelled in the right direction. One of the ideas is to split sub-Saharan African countries into "three buckets", the first being the "low-hanging fruit" primed for LPG growth. "Maybe they're missing some infrastructure pieces, but the government knows what they are and is making investments, global players are willing to put their money in, and the population aspires to have LPG," Kelly says. The second bucket is more "transitional", with small LPG markets in urban centres but very little outside of this, while the third are those "where growth is going to take a while to take place".
The roadmap will not be static, nor will the CFLA be, with plans to grow the task force and some WLGA members already showing an interest in joining, according to Kelly. The next steps will be to work on messaging prior to the G20 meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at Cop 29, both of which are expected to have clean cooking high on the agenda. Kelly expects this to also be the case, possibly to an even greater degree, at Cop 30 in Belem, Brazil, and at the G20 meeting in South Africa a year later.
Unequivocal endorsements
One CFLA member, TotalEnergies — which distributes LPG in 22 African countries — has signalled its intent to spread clean cooking to hundreds of millions of Africansduring a recent WLGA webinar. "The IEA and the World Bank have unequivocally endorsed LPG as a crucial component of clean cooking… beyond 2030," the major's head of LPG business development Monzur Siddiqui says. For Siddiqui, three pillars are needed to support development of LPG markets in the region — the establishment of appropriate and properly enforced regulations, the affordability of LPG to consumers and the sustainability of the distribution models.
The main growth enabler for fellow member Petredec's downstream head James Bullen will be infrastructure. The company is well versed in the issue, having set up the Mauritius and Richards Bay LPG terminals serving east Africa in 2014 and 2020. Investing in large-scale distribution systems has historically been lacking but if done right, can help LPG use spread more widely, he says — provided LPG is economically viable, always available and in the locations it is needed the most.
