Environment
Propane Gas Makes Clean, Affordable Energy Available to Everyone
In comparison to other widely used fuels, propane has one of the lowest carbon emissions per million BTUs. Propane produces 43% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than an equivalent amount of electricity generated from the national electric grid.
To learn about plans that would force New York residents to pay thousands of dollars in carbon taxes and more than $20,000 to convert your home to an electric heat pump, go here.
To find out more about propane’s contribution to improving the environment, go here.
Renewable Propane — Safe, reliable and economical
Propane is already clean-burning and energy-efficient, and it’s becoming even more eco-friendly with the emergence of renewable propane.
What is renewable propane? It’s a revolutionary advance in how we heat our homes and fuel gas-powered appliances, businesses, construction sites and vehicles. The Propane Education & Research Council has found that renewable propane’s carbon intensity (CI) is roughly one-half to one-fourth that of conventional propane. The reason for this incredibly low CI is its production process. Renewable propane is produced using many of the same recycled and organic feedstocks as biofuel, including:
- Used cooking oil
- Animal fats
- Soybean oil
- Inedible corn oil
- Forest waste and other woody biomass
- Agricultural residue
- Municipal waste
These feedstocks are plentiful and affordable, and renewable propane’s production process has a low carbon impact. At the point of combustion, renewable propane is entirely carbon neutral.
We are seeing constant innovation in identifying new feedstocks, including crops like camelina that require little water and grow on otherwise fallow land. Research is finding promising products that can go into renewable blends, like renewable dimethyl ether, which comes from dairy waste, biogas and landfills. There’s even an MIT-developed process for converting plastic waste into propane gas!
Renewable propane’s production footprint continues to grow!
Although renewable propane is not in wide use yet, the U.S. produces more and more of it every year. In 2021, producers in this country made 4.6 million gallons of renewable propane. In April 2022, 60,000 gallons of renewable propane arrived by train in New York, the first of many shipments to follow.
Because renewable propane is molecularly identical to conventional propane, you can blend it with conventional propane and use it in your existing systems without modification. In fact, it’s already in use today, powering residential and commercial equipment and fueling cars that use propane autogas.
We expect that, by 2030, renewable propane, propane and other innovative blends will be America’s most widely available, affordable, accessible zero-carbon solution!
You can find out more about the advances in renewable propane here.
As always, you can count on your local propane gas company to make reliable deliveries of clean, affordable propane—the Energy for Everyone in New York State.
