Calor Gas Ltd, the UK’s leading supplier of LPG, has become the first energy company to supply BioLPG to homes and businesses across the country. BioLPG is Calor’s first renewable product offering that sees the company commit to reducing its carbon footprint and to become fully renewable by 2040.
Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) is typically used for heating off the gas grid, transport and industrial applications and is already a flexible, low-carbon fuel compared to other fossil fuels. However, as BioLPG is identical to conventional LPG, it can be blended, stored and used as a drop-in replacement for all existing LPG applications with no modification.
As such BioLPG can reduce fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by up to 88 percent over conventional LPG dependent on the feedstock used, allowing environment-conscious consumers and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint, hassle-free.
Modelling by Calor, a subsidiary of Netherlands-headed SHV Energy that recently signed an exclusive BioLPG (biopropane) off-take agreement with Finland-headed oil refiner and renewable fuel producer Neste Oyj, shows that over 180 000 rural off-gas grid homes in the UK could be heated using BioLPG by 2030 if additional domestic sources of supply are developed, helping the government to achieve its carbon emission targets.
This exciting new development will enable our existing customers to dramatically improve their carbon footprint with no adjustment to their current heating systems or vehicles. It will also, for the first time, enable rural customers and fleet operators to use one of the lowest polluting energy sources in the world today. This development is part of our ongoing commitment to reduce our carbon emissions whilst growing our business and, by 2040, our ambition is for 100 percent of our energy products to be from renewable sources, said Matthew Hickin, Chief Executive, Calor in a statement.
Exploring UK production potential
The UK government’s “Clean Growth Strategy“, launched October 2017, outlines ambitious new policies to phase out the use of high carbon fossil fuels such as heating oil and coal typically used off the gas grid for domestic heat during the 2020s.
As part of this, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has recently published a consultation on “A future framework for heat in buildings” which has called for leadership from the off-gas grid heating industry to bring about the transformational shift required to change the way homes are heated. Biopropane) is referenced in the consultation as a potential pathway to achieving decarbonisation off the gas grid.
Calor says that it is currently “exploring domestic sources of production” as the majority of BioLPG production pathways lend themselves to local production facilities located in the off-gas grid market such as anaerobic digestion (AD) or production based on the processing of household waste. This would facilitate the decentralisation of energy provision and bring production much closer to areas of demand.
