Supply shortages have led to another increase in price of Liquefied Natural Gas (LPG), as the Nigerian Association of Liquefied Petroleum Gas Marketers (NALPGAM) raised an alarm over the soaring cost of cooking gas in the country.

The association warned that the continuous increase in price could spark public outrage against operators of gas filling stations.

The association disclosed that cooking gas now sells between N1, 500 and N1, 700 per kilogram, while marketers pay between N25.2 million and N26.2 million for a 20-metric-tonne truck of liquefied petroleum gas, depending on location.

Speaking on the development, NALPGAM National President, Mr. Edu Inyang, appealed to the federal government to urgently intervene and stabilise the supply and pricing of the product to prevent further hardship on Nigerians.

According to him, the current situation has placed millions of households, food vendors, small businesses and low-income earners under severe pressure, as many Nigerians can no longer afford cooking gas for daily use.

“It is sad and rather very pathetic to inform the general public that Nigerians have woken up to buy cooking gas, which should be a social item, at a prohibitive cost of over N1,500 per kilogram. We feel that if the situation is not immediately checked, citizens may rise against owners of gas stations”, Inyang said.

He attributed the rising cost of LPG to persistent supply shortages, high depot prices, logistics bottlenecks and escalating operational costs faced by marketers nationwide.

Inyang warned that the development was undermining years of progress recorded in Nigeria’s clean energy drive, noting that many households were already reverting to firewood and charcoal due to the high cost of cooking gas.

According to him, the trend poses serious risks to public health, environmental sustainability and the country’s clean energy targets.

He further warned that failure to urgently address the crisis could worsen food inflation, lead to job losses, cripple small LPG retail businesses and reduce investor confidence in the sector.

NALPGAM therefore called on the Federal Government, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), NNPC Ltd., domestic producers and other stakeholders in the LPG value chain to take immediate and coordinated action to stabilise the market.

The association recommended increased domestic supply allocation, transparent product distribution, removal of bottlenecks in importation and distribution, as well as strategic interventions to make cooking gas more affordable and accessible to Nigerians.

…FX remains major challenge – Expert

Speaking with Daily Trust, Prof. Dayo Ayoade, an energy law expert at the University of Lagos, said the problem is all part of the entire energy paradox of Nigeria, where a very wealthy country struggles to supply energy resources to its people at a reasonable price.

He added that the cause of the increase is global due to the Middle East conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and internal supply chain constraints.

“Forex has always been unstable and having limited supplies of forex does not help. There’s a need for us to look at addressing each of those headings, such as high cost of transportation and logistics, moving products across the country.

The Petroleum Industry Act (PIA has provided a market-driven structure for downstream products. No more subsidies, no more government interventions to stop price rises. The market, the people have to bear the increase. So if the price swings up, they bear the shock. If it goes down, they enjoy the benefit and in the meantime, there’s the issue of inflation feeding in from these sharp rises. And this is a big problem.

“We also have insufficient domestic LPG processing plants, storage. And even the manufacturing cylinders. It’s the entire ecosystem that needs to be addressed. So the government has to address each and every one of these problems.”

He added that the implications of continuous rise is very dire for Nigerians, adding that the fear that people may physically attack stations because of this huge price in gas is not an exaggeration.

“This is because there’s an issue of potential physical attacks percolating into political discontent. The 2027 general election is coming up. That could become a very difficult issue as the cost of living crisis has persisted for a while. And there’s, perhaps wrongly, a view that the government is not taking the crisis seriously. Politicians seem to live at a better level than the regular hard-working Nigerians. If we don’t address this issue of the LPG crisis, people will, of course, abandon their cooking gas and turn to their normal firewood and charcoal which, of course, is environmentally destructive. That could become a problem.

“So the whole energy poverty that Nigerians are suffering, when you combine this with the failure of the power sector, with the cost of buying PMS, it becomes choking.”

On what can be done, he called for the construction of robust LPG manufacturing facilities, distribution and transport networks as the PIA has given domestic gas obligations to the gas producers.

“We need to enforce it strictly in a way that we feed the gas into the supply chain, so that it gets to the domestic consumer. So I’m for a huge promotion of local content. I think if we domesticate it, then we will see advantages. I think also that the price rise is also the fact that there’s been limited importation, limited competition, and maybe some players in the market may be taking advantage of this,” he added. (Daily Trust)