LP Gas magazine

Each year at the LP Gas Growth Summit, we ask propane retailers about the supply picture in their region of the country and the strategies they use in their operations. In this week’s #TraderCorner, we’re sharing retailer responses from our 2024 event. (Image: tttuna/E /Getty Images)

Happy Election Day! Before you vote, make sure to read LP Gas' election preview to learn about how the results of today's election could impact the propane industry. (Illustration by Leo Michael) Read the story here: https://lnkd.in/ee6QrWfC

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is providing $970,000 to school districts for the purchase of propane school buses. (Image: tttuna/E /Getty Images)

Residents and businesses of western North Carolina banded together to provide relief to the community through efforts related to propane needs. Read the story here. (Photo: Stringer Oil & LP Gas Co.)

This week took us north of the border for a tour of Otodata Inc., a Montreal-based company that manufactures propane tank monitoring systems. (It also measures and monitors other fuels, industrial gases and solids.) But our focus, of course, was on the propane side of the business. Otodata President André Boulay led the tour throughout several of the company's facilities, covering production, research and development, quality, marketing and more. Its headquarter location features two production lines, each assembling 1,200 to 1,600 monitors per day. This production is adding to the 2 million Otodata devices already used by 3,500 customers in the field. One part of the tour that caught our attention was the space devoted to its surface mount technology machine, which assembles components onto circuit boards through high-tech automation. In addition to Montreal, the company, with about 250 employees, has locations in Brazil, Chile, Israel and Poland. It also established a presence in the U.S. in 2023 when it opened a distribution facility outside Pittsburgh.

Propane can go everywhere, and we don’t need government or rate payer subsidies to do it. Read Tom Jaenicke's Marketing Mix column about the residential propane market here. (Image: tttuna/E /Getty Images)

Dan Richardson, president and CEO of Conger LP Gas, stresses how propane needs to be part of the power generation discussion. #LPGasFuel4Thought “Power generation is more and has to be more than backup generators,” Richardson says. “Combined heat and power units and fuel cells are coming; make no mistake. It reminds me of 25 years ago when tankless water heaters were just starting. Today, they dominate the market. Propane needs to participate in the discussion and get involved in the design as it will be a dominant usage in the next 10 years.”

The Propane Education & Research Council (PERC) is dedicating October as Clean Energy Month. Throughout the month, PERC has been highlighting propane’s role in advancing a cleaner, more sustainable future. Read more about it here. (Photo courtesy of PERC)

U.S. average expenditures for households heating primarily with propane will total about $1,190, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Winter Fuels Outlook. Read about the report here. (Photo by LP Gas staff)

The School District of Philadelphia, which serves just under 200,000 students, added 38 propane-powered school buses to its fleet. Read the news here. (Photo courtesy of the Propane Education & Research Council)