Former CEO of the erstwhile Ghana@50 Secretariat, Dr. Charles Wereko-Brobby has called for a temporary ban on the use of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). According to him the indiscriminate use of the product is not in the public interest. His comments come after several months of shortage of LPG nationwide, raising concerns for both domestic and transport users. While some have called on the Tema Oil Refinery to increase supply of LPG to meet the increasing demand, Dr. Brobby told Joy FM’s Super Morning Show host Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah that is not the way to go. According to him, the more LPG that is imported into the country, the more transport users will turn to the product because it is cheaper. He maintained that LPG, a waste product of the refining process was introduced for domestic activities in the late 80s to reduce the use of charcoal and its attendant challenges on tree felling and climate change. He explained that the current situation where LPG is used in the transport industry has dire consequences not only for domestic users of LPG but TOR which produces petrol and diesel for transport owners. Even though price tariffs have been used to curtail the use of LPG in the transport industry that has not worked, he opined. “The illogical thing about the whole thing is that if we are spending a substantial amount of our foreign exchange to import petrol; to import crude oil to refine into petrol and diesel and we decide that well we will abandon the main product for transportation and use the by-product for transportation then what is the essence of getting into that whole process at all. “…I want the ban to be imposed until such a time that the country has got its own natural gas,” he said. He added the country must make a choice between the use LPG for domestic chores and save the climate or give in to transport users who only have a parochial interest of getting cheaper LPG gas for their vehicles. “The more LPG that is imported, the more people convert to gas. We have got into a situation where what was meant to be an economic and environmental use of a waste product is now gotten into a situation where you just cannot simply break the cycle. You cannot restrict the use of gas to taxis, to few vehicles or those that have been converted.” he said. He said in 1989, consumption of LPG was 13,000 but consumption has now entered into several hundreds of thousands of metric tones. He feared the concentration on LPG could affect the activity at TOR because its main product-petrol and diesel could be redundant. Story by Nathan Gadugah/Myjoyonline.com/Ghana