LPG Supply This Winter: What Middle East Tanker Attacks Mean for UK Cylinder and Bulk Prices Tanker attacks in the Middle East make the front pages, and within a day or two the phone calls start. Will there be enough gas? Should we stock up now? Our honest answer on LPG supply in the UK this winter is that a physical shortage is unlikely, but a price move is a different thing altogether, and the two get muddled every time a ship gets hit. If you buy propane, butane or dispense gas for a business in Yorkshire or the North West, the sensible response is not panic buying. It is a contract review and a delivery plan, done now rather than in January. Here is how the supply chain actually works, and what it means for what you pay. Where UK LPG comes from, before you judge the headlines LPG is the umbrella term for propane and butane, and most of what fills a UK cylinder or bulk tank starts a lot closer to home than the Gulf. For a start, propane and butane come out of North Sea gas processing as natural gas liquids. More comes from domestic refinery output as a by-product of making petrol and diesel. The balance arrives by sea, and those cargoes come mainly from North West Europe and the US Gulf, where shale output has turned the United States into the biggest LPG exporter in the world. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes the production and trade figures in its Energy Trends series if you want to see the pattern for yourself. So a tanker hit in the Red Sea does not empty a terminal on the Humber. What it does is move the numbers that sit underneath your quote. LPG trades against global benchmark prices, and those prices respond to risk wherever it appears. Vessels avoiding the Red Sea and routing around the Cape of Good Hope instead of using the Suez Canal add thousands of nautical miles to a Europe-bound voyage, roughly 3,000 to 4,000 by most shipping estimates, and UNCTAD reported through 2024 that the detour was adding around ten days or more to transit times. Longer voyages tie up ships. Fewer available ships means higher charter rates. War-risk insurance premiums load on top, and refrigerated gas carriers are expensive to move in the first place. Then the cost layers continue after the cargo lands. Import terminal handling, road tanker haulage, filling and testing at depot, cylinder handling, and the diesel in the delivery vehicle that brings a pallet of 47kg propane to your yard. That is four or five separate cost layers between a headline and a cylinder cage, and only the first of them moves with the news. The distinction worth holding on to is this: a price event is not a shortage. A shortage means the product is not there at any price. A price event means it is there and it costs more. News coverage blurs the two because both make a good story, but they call for completely different responses from a buyer. What shipping disruption does to cylinder and bulk prices Bulk and cylinder gas behave differently, and buyers who watch only one of them misread their own exposure. Bulk propane sits closest to the commodity. A bulk LPG price per litre reflects the wholesale market fairly directly, so it tends to move in smaller, more frequent steps, and it moves sooner. If freight and insurance costs climb through the autumn, bulk buyers usually feel it first. Cylinder prices work differently. The gas is only part of what you are paying for. Filling, periodic cylinder testing and requalification, valve maintenance, handling, depot overheads and delivery all sit outside the commodity, and none of those costs change because a ship took the long way round Africa. The result is that cylinder pricing resets less often, but when it resets it tends to move in a bigger single step. If you only ever check one of the two, you will be surprised by the other. Also, the timing is unhelpful. Northern Hemisphere heating demand peaks in the same months, so any freight shock lands on a market that is already tight on vessels and storage. Winter is when the market has the least slack to absorb anything. Dispense gas deserves a note of its own here, because the mixed gas and CO2 that pushes beer up your lines does not follow propane. Food-grade CO2 in the UK and Europe is largely a by-product of fertiliser and bioethanol production, which is why the 2021 squeeze followed CF Industries halting ammonia production at its UK plants rather than anything happening at sea. Different chain, different risk, same cellar. Who feels a supply squeeze first Off-grid homes and businesses on bulk propane usually notice before anyone else, because heating load is the most weather-sensitive use there is. A 1,200 litre tank that comfortably lasted ten weeks on October usage can run down in a fraction of that time through a sustained cold snap. A percentage reading on the gauge tells you almost nothing on its own. Weeks of winter cover is the number that matters. Pubs and bars come next. Dispense gas sits in the same commercial gas supply chain as everything else we deliver, and cylinder demand across the trade tightens in the run-up to Christmas. A busy house running mixed gas and CO2 sees dispense volume climb sharply over the festive weeks, so the cylinder count that worked fine in September leaves you with no buffer on the Saturday before Christmas. Forklift fleets feel it in a different way again. Peak logistics season means double shifts, and a missed cylinder delivery does not make the warehouse chilly, it stops the picking operation. That is a cost measured in hours of a stopped line, not in pence per kilo. Fabrication and welding workshops carry two exposures at once, shielding gas for the welding and propane for heating the shop floor, and the heating demand only turns up once the temperature drops. Winter stock planning: getting your cylinder holding right The most common mistake we see is a simple one. People size their cylinder holding on summer usage and never revisit it. Think about what changes between September and December. Patio heaters go on every evening instead of the odd weekend. Cellar cooling works harder when the outside temperature swings, and dispense volume goes up with trade. Forklifts move to double shifts. A workshop heater that ran for an hour in October runs most of the day in January. Any one of those lifts the weekly run rate. Together they can multiply it, and the autumn delivery pattern no longer covers you. Running to the last cylinder is the expensive strategy. We will always take a last-minute call and we will get gas to you if you have run short, but an emergency delivery should be the exception, not your plan. A scheduled delivery round works better, in effect a milk round: stock arrives on a set pattern without you picking up the phone each time, and you hold a buffer instead of a cliff edge. Specification matters more under pressure than it does in calm weather. Grabbing whatever cylinder happens to be available in a rush is how you end up with the wrong valve for a forklift or the wrong fitting for a dispense regulator, and that costs you a shift rather than a few pounds. Sort the detail before winter: 13kg patio gas for outdoor heaters and smaller catering use 19kg and 47kg propane for commercial heating, workshops and larger appliances Forklift cylinders specified by valve type to match your trucks, not just by weight Dispense gas, mixed gas and CO2, matched to your cellar setup and line length Hobbyweld rental-free cylinders for workshops and trade users who only draw welding gas now and then While you are counting stock, look at what is sitting in the corner of the cage doing nothing. Old or unwanted cylinders take up space you will want in December, and returning them frees up room and recovers deposits. Better to do that now than to find the cage full of empties you cannot identify on a Friday afternoon. Protecting your gas costs: what to ask for on a business account Price per cylinder is the headline, and it is rarely the whole story. When you ask for a quote, ask for the structure around it too. How the price is set and when it gets reviewed Delivery charges, and whether they change for smaller drops Cylinder rental, or whether a rental-free option suits your usage better Minimum order quantities and the lead time on a standard delivery What happens when you run short outside the scheduled round Review dispense gas separately from bottled gas. This is where pubs find money, and it is almost always because the two are bundled into one account and nobody has ever benchmarked the dispense side on its own. Our own account reviews have found savings on both the dispense gas and bottled gas lines once they are priced separately rather than bundled. If you want the detail on what drives those savings, our guide to beer gas costs and how pubs cut them breaks it down line by line, and it is worth ten minutes before you decide whether there is better value on beer gas available for your cellar. For small workshops and trade users, rental-free Hobbyweld cylinders are usually the better fit. If you only weld intermittently, paying rent on a cylinder that sits still for weeks at a time makes no sense. Even better, local stock shortens everything. Innergy delivers from six depots at Leeds, Dewsbury, Knottingley, Goole, York and Manchester, with set delivery areas across Yorkshire and the North West, so the gap between your order and a cylinder on site is measured in a short local run rather than a national routing exercise. Our drivers know the yards they are delivering into, which matters more than people expect when you need a changeover done quickly. A pre-winter checklist you can work through this month Count what you hold. Full cylinders, part-used cylinders, and the percentage in any bulk tank. Convert it to weeks of winter cover, not weeks at today’s usage. Use last January’s consumption if you have it. Fix a scheduled delivery pattern so stock arrives on a set day without a phone call each time. Get a written comparison quote on dispense gas, bottled gas and bulk, with the structure as well as the price. Check storage and handling. Cylinders stored upright and secured, cage locked, ventilation clear, and at least two people on site trained in the changeover procedure so it does not wait for one person’s day off. Liquid Gas UK publishes the industry codes of practice that sit behind safe storage. Return old cylinders you no longer use and recover the deposits before the busy period. None of that depends on what happens in the Red Sea next month, which is rather the point. You cannot control freight rates or war-risk premiums. You can control your holding, your delivery pattern and the terms on your account, and those three between them decide most of what you actually pay for LPG supply in the UK this winter. If you want a side-by-side review of what you are paying now against what we would charge, request a quote and we will go through the dispense gas, bottled gas and bulk lines separately rather than quoting one bundled figure. Don’t just take our word for it on the savings, send us your current invoice and we will show you the comparison. Frequently Asked Questions Will Middle East tanker attacks cause an LPG shortage in the UK this winter? A physical shortage is unlikely. Most UK propane and butane comes from North Sea gas processing, domestic refinery output and seaborne imports from North West Europe and the US Gulf, not from direct Middle East cargoes. What shipping disruption does change is freight rates, insurance costs and global benchmark pricing, so the realistic effect is on price rather than availability. Why do bulk LPG prices per litre move faster than cylinder prices? Bulk propane sits closer to the raw commodity, so a bulk LPG price per litre tracks the wholesale market in smaller, more frequent steps. Cylinder prices carry filling, testing, handling, depot and delivery costs that do not move with the market, so they tend to reset less often but in larger jumps when they do. How much gas should a pub or workshop hold going into winter? Base it on winter usage, not current usage. Work out your weekly run rate from last January if you have the figures, add a buffer for the busiest fortnight, and make sure the holding covers you between scheduled deliveries with room to spare. For a pub, that usually means more dispense gas through December than the September count suggests. Does dispense gas for pubs get affected by the same supply pressures as propane? Partly. Dispense gas moves through the same commercial gas supply chain, filling, cylinder handling and delivery, so cost pressure in logistics touches it. The CO2 itself has a different source though, largely a by-product of fertiliser and bioethanol production, which is why past CO2 squeezes followed plant shutdowns rather than shipping events. How can I compare my current gas account against a new quote? Take a recent invoice and split it into the parts that are actually comparable: price per cylinder or per litre, delivery charges, any cylinder rental, and minimum order terms. Ask for dispense gas and bottled gas quoted separately rather than bundled. Send us the invoice and we will put our figures alongside yours line by line so you can see where the difference sits.