When the World LPG Association set the goal of one billion people transitioned from kerosene, charcoal, and firewood to clean LPG by 2030, the announcement was framed as a global health story. It is. Three to four million people die every year from indoor air pollution caused by primitive cooking fuels, most of them women and children, most of them in households where alternatives are not just unaffordable but logistically unavailable. That is the moral case, and it does not need elaboration.
What is less discussed is the operational case. The one-billion target cannot be hit without Sub-Saharan Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa cannot be served without a credible Nigerian distribution backbone. I want to make that case here, because I think the people who will fund and build this transition are mostly outside Nigeria, and I think the conversation has been too high-level for too long.
The maths.
Roughly half of the people the global goal is aimed at live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Of those, the largest single market, by population, by urbanisation, and by existing energy infrastructure, is Nigeria. We are 220 million people. Our urban share is 53% and rising. Our LPG consumption has roughly tripled in a decade. The country has the world's tenth-largest gas reserves. The supply is here. The infrastructure to move it from depot to household, at scale and reliably, is not yet here.
What "infrastructure" actually means.
When development institutions talk about clean-cooking infrastructure, they tend to mean three things: import jetties, bulk storage, and household-scale connection points. All three matter. None of them is the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is the middle layer, the part between a 5,000-tonne storage facility on the coast and a single household in Ibadan. That middle layer is bobtails, bridgers, depots, weighbridges, certified drivers, GPS tracking, billing infrastructure that estate managers can audit, safety training that survives past day 90, and pricing transparency that procurement directors at hospital groups can plan around. It is unglamorous. It is also where every realistic version of the one-billion target succeeds or fails.
You cannot deliver a public-health outcome on a supply chain that is, on a Tuesday morning, three hours late. Reliability is the precondition for the transition, not a feature of it.
Why Lagos and Ibadan are the right model cities.
Lagos and Ibadan together account for a meaningful share of West Africa's urban LPG consumption. They sit on the same logistical corridor. The port-to-Lagos-to-Ibadan stretch is roughly 130 km of tarred road, with a daily working culture of industrial transport already established. If the model city for the global clean-cooking transition exists anywhere, it exists here. The question is what we choose to do with that.
Three things would have to be true for the corridor to scale into a credible model:
- Reticulation has to be normal, not exceptional. Estate-by-estate, hotel-by-hotel, hospital-by-hospital reticulated systems with individual unit metering, these remove the cylinder-handling risk entirely and shift the consumer relationship from a transaction to an account. We have been deploying these at Bomart and the demand outstrips our installation pace.
- Pricing has to be published. A transition where households cannot plan their cooking budget more than two weeks in advance is not a transition, it is an oscillation. Operators have to commit to longer published pricing windows. Customers and regulators have to demand them.
- Safety has to be regulated and inspected. Not aspirationally regulated, actually inspected, with consequences. The 2025 SON enforcement on substandard cylinders was a useful signal. It needs to become the norm.
What the global community can do.
I will be direct. The clean-cooking transition will not be built by NGOs. It will be built by indigenous operators in places like Lagos who run depot-to-destination supply chains every day, hire local drivers and technicians, train them on internal certification programmes, and persist when the FX corridor moves and the regulatory environment shifts. What the global development community can do is recognise this and back it.
That means three things, in my view:
- Patient infrastructure capital, not grant fragmentation. A bobtail, a depot, a reticulation system, an operator-training programme, these need 7–10 year financing, not 24-month grants.
- Standards harmonisation, so a Nigerian-certified plant operator's training is portable across West Africa.
- Procurement preference at multinationals operating in Nigeria for indigenous suppliers who meet international safety standards. The market signal alone is enormous.
At Bomart, we have spent eleven years building the unglamorous middle layer of the LPG distribution chain in South-West Nigeria. We are 300+ enterprise customers in. We are debt-light, profitable, and growing. We are also one company. The transition needs five hundred companies like us, doing the work we do, every day, for the next decade.
The good news is the work is doable. The supply is here. The customers are here. The model cities are here. What is needed is the operational discipline to do it the same way for a long time. We are committed to ours. I hope this brief invites others to commit to theirs.
— Abisoye Adebayo · Lekki, Lagos · March 2026 · aa@bomartworld.com