Clean cooking push: What happened to city gas plans?

When January Makamba was appointed minister of energy a few years ago, he championed Tanzania’s most ambitious drive towards using clean energy for cooking. For months, Makamba went around the nation promoting gas for domestic uses. In a nation where 90 percent of energy comes from biomass and where 469,000 hectares of trees are cleared annually, the minister’s intervention was commendable.

Today, Makamba’s mantle has been passed on to others. The champions of the gas-for-cooking project include the very President Samia Suluhu Hassan herself. President Hassan’s ambitious goal is to have 80 percent of households using clean energy for cooking by 2030. 4.6 trillion shillings have been allocated for that programme. As commendable as that is, however, a puzzling question arises: why isn’t Tanzania utilising its existing natural gas infrastructure for domestic use?

Natural gas is naturally available gas coming from gas fields in Songo Songo in Lindi and Mnazi Bay in Mtwara. This is the gas that is firing Tanzania’s gas plants in Ubungo, Kinyerezi, and Tegeta, providing 67 percent of all energy production before the recent commissioning of the first two turbines at JNHPP. Natural gas comes in two forms – Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). The two gases are the same substance, only differentiated in the fact that CNG exists in a gaseous form while LNG exists in a liquid form. Those physical characteristics lead to significant differences in the economics of the two solutions, but LNG is the practical solution for domestic usage while CNG finds better usage elsewhere (in Tanzania, it is increasingly being used for vehicles where about 5,000 vehicles, including 400 Dangote trucks have been converted to use CNG). Given that natural gas exists in Tanzania, the fact that the pipelines are already laid, and that utilisation is pitifully low, LNG and CNG are quite cheap, costing 23,000 for a 15kg cylinder.