by Guy Page
At the Wednesday, May 29 meeting of the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association in Manchester, VDC interviewed Leslie Anderson, President/CEO of the Propane Gas Association of New England, about a perspective you won’t read often, if at all, in mainstream media:
Propane should be considered renewable – or at least sustainable and recycled – energy.
Wait a minute, you ask – isn’t propane a fossil fuel, mined from the earth?
Well – yes and no.
Propane, strictly speaking, is a recycled byproduct of natural gas production – the same natural gas that provides about 50% of New England’s electricity as well as a growing share of thermal heat. When petroleum is refined for ANY use – natural gas, heating oil, kerosene, gasoline, plastics – propane happens.
When unused, it’s treated like backyard trash and burned off. But when used as propane fuel for heat and transportation (THIRD MOST USED transportation fuel in the world, after gasoline and diesel), it’s using an existing resource at no extra carbon emissions.
Carbon emissions are carbon-neutral in the sense that they’ll either be burned off, or used as fuel.
“It’s something that’s left over. If we don’t use it, we lose it,” Anderson says during the interview.
We’ll have propane “as long as we have elastics in our underwear,” Anderson laughed. “So we should use it.”
For more information go to PGANE.ORG.