LPG still has air quality role to play in Europe

LPG has potential to become a greener heating fuel alternative, but supportive regulatory policies are needed for its adoption, writes Waldemar Jaszczyk

LPG can still play an important role helping Europe to tackle its air pollution problem as an off-grid heating fuel and autogas if it is given a chance, panellists said during the European LPG Congress in Barcelona on 29-30 June.

Poor air quality is the single largest environmental health risk in the EU, with particulate matter (PM) alone responsible for more than 300,000 premature deaths in the 27 EU member states in 2019, according to the European Environment Agency. Car transport accounts for a significant proportion of air pollutant emissions, but this is largely NOx emissions in urban areas.

The problem of PM emissions comes from the use of more-polluting heating and industrial fuels, often in rural areas. Around 40mn homes are outside a natural gas grid in Europe that predominantly use heating oil, coal and biomass for heating, while 40pc of commercial buildings use the same fuels, and 27pc of industrial facilities, according to European LPG distributor UGI International's vice-president of growth and transformation, Beth Reid.

The transportation, heating and industrial sectors all have to share the burden of air quality degradation, Reid said. And it is not a standalone issue outside the climate change crisis. At least 75pc of the causes of climate change are also responsible for air pollution, the World Health Organisation's director of public health and the environment, Maria Neira, said. LPG's potential role in improving air quality in Europe has often been espoused by the industry given it has far lower PM, NOx and other pollutant emissions compared with other fossil fuels or solid biomass. It benefits from being readily available now and is affordable.

In Poland, the post-communist economic transformation radically reduced air pollution, with PM emissions from power generation 100 times lower today than they were in 1990, Polish LPG association POGP's director Bartosz Kwiatkowski said. It also brought about an explosion in car usage, but the simultaneous surge in autogas vehicles' popularity softened the blow from the transport sector, he said. Autogas accounts for about 15pc of Poland's total passenger cars, cutting CO2 emissions by around 1mn t/yr and PM emissions by up to 80pc, he said.

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But Poland still has serious air quality issues, and much like other countries in central and eastern Europe, these are often less to do with road transport in urban areas and more from the use of dirtier heating fuels in off-grid locations, air quality data provider Airly's chief executive and co-founder Wiktor Warchalowski said.

Around 60pc of Polish households in off-grid areas use old coal boilers — another legacy of the country's communist past as well as its substantial domestic coal industry. The government's clean air programme has moved to replace these with a mix of technologies including natural gas, LPG and heat pumps since 2018, significantly improving the situation, Warchalowski said. LPG has a big role to play in helping lower pollutant emissions as Europe transitions to net zero, he said.

But regulatory challenges for LPG remain, largely because it is a fossil fuel. More needs to be done to decarbonise the sector and scale up production of renewable gaseous fuels, the European Commission's head of the clean air unit in the directorate-general for the environment, Francois Wakenhut, said. This warning is not falling on deaf ears, Reid said, pointing to UGI International's investments across Europe to increase the production of renewable gases. But supportive regulatory policies are critical in giving confidence to the sector, she said.

Another threat to action on air quality comes from the Ukraine war, panellists said. Applications to replace coal boilers with gas ones dropped dramatically in March as consumers became worried about surging gas prices, Wachalowski said. But the war's onset also supported autogas use owing to its lower comparative cost.