Long read: India’s LPG Crisis Has An Indigenous Fix. It’s Been Waiting Since 2020.

India’s vulnerabilities emanating from its energy imports have been thoroughly exposed in the recent past from Trump’s trade negotiations involving use of Russian oil to the recent US-Israel-Iran war induced LPG crisis. Whilst we have made significant strides in adding renewable capacity, we are a long way off from energy security. But as this article explains, there are possibilities. Much like we have increased ethanol blending in automobile fuels, methanol seems like an option for cooking fuel.

But first, how bad is the current LPG crisis?

“India consumes roughly 31.3 million metric tonnes of LPG a year and imports between 60 and 67 per cent of what it needs, depending on which source you consult. Over 90 per cent of those imports transit through the Strait.

When the current Iran-US-Israel conflict disrupted shipping through that chokepoint, the effects were almost immediate: weekly LPG imports fell by an estimated 30 per cent, commercial cylinder supply was halted in cities across the country, and the government invoked the Essential Commodities Act to prioritise household supply.

The short-term response has been broadly sensible. Refineries have been directed to maximise LPG output. Alternative supply from the United States, Australia and Algeria is being sourced. India had already signed a 2.2-million-tonne LPG supply deal with the US Gulf Coast; that diversification now looks prescient rather than merely prudent.”

However, this still retains external dependence. So, what is the indigenous solution that can take us to ‘Atmanirbharta’?

“On 10 March 2026, Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, former Director General of CSIR, former Director of NCL, and former Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, posted a pointed message on X.

His argument was simple: India already has an indigenous cooking-fuel technology that can substitute for LPG. It is produced from Indian feedstocks, it burns cleaner, and the demonstration work is done. What it needs now is institutional support to scale up.

The technology Mashelkar is referring to is Dimethyl Ether, or DME.

CSIR’s National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune has been working on it since at least 2017, when CSIR approved a mission-mode project on catalysis for sustainable development.

The process is straightforward in concept: methanol is dehydrated in the presence of a catalyst to produce DME. India’s own coal or biomass can serve as the feedstock for the upstream methanol synthesis, making the entire chain, from raw material to cooking fuel, producible domestically.

The chemistry is sound. DME is a gas at ambient conditions but liquefies under modest pressure, about 6 bar at 25 degrees Celsius, which gives it handling and storage properties similar to LPG.

It can be blended with LPG at up to 20 per cent without significant infrastructure changes; the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has already notified a standard for this.

CSIR-NCL has also demonstrated a specially designed burner stove that can run on 100 per cent DME. The combustion is cleaner (lower NOx, lower SOx, no soot) and efficiency trials have shown 10-15 per cent improvement over conventional LPG burners.”

But there is a catch: “The feedstock for DME is methanol. And here is the catch: India currently imports over 90 per cent of its methanol.

Domestic production stands at roughly 0.7 million metric tonnes against demand of 3-4 million tonnes. Every existing Indian methanol plant runs on natural gas or naphtha, both of which are themselves imported.

So a DME programme that simply uses today’s methanol supply would, in effect, be substituting one import dependency for another, swapping LPG from West Asia for methanol feedstock from elsewhere. That does not solve the structural problem. The whole point of DME is that India has the raw materials to produce its own methanol.

Coal-to-methanol-to-DME is the proven pathway. China has built it at enormous scale: about two-thirds of Chinese methanol comes from coal, and the country has had DME production capacity exceeding 10 million tonnes per year, with most of it going into LPG blending.

India has vast reserves of high-ash coal, which makes it an available feedstock. But a national cooking-fuel programme running on coal gasification would sit uneasily with India’s climate commitments.

The cleaner path runs through biomass: India generates approximately 230 million metric tonnes of surplus agricultural biomass annually, plus around 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste. Biomass-to-methanol-to-DME is technically feasible, though it requires more development at scale than the coal route.

The CO2-to-DME pathway being developed by CSIR-IICT and BHEL opens a third option. A serious DME programme would need to specify which feedstock pathway it is pursuing and at what pace, and be transparent about the trade-offs.”

Whilst the piece goes on to acknowledge these trade-offs, the point is that policy making in India much like elsewhere mostly happens during a crisis. In this case, we have the technology and the feedstock. The US and Israel have just served us the crisis.

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