Galp said on Monday that the crisis in the supply of cooking gas, verified in recent days, in the Greater Maputo region, was due to expansion works in the unit supplying the fuel in the city of Matola as well as the growing demand typical at this time of the year. The government has promised that the gas shortage in the Maputo metropolitan area will end this Wednesday.
According to Paulo Varela, from Galp’s Public Relations department, cited by newspaper “O País”, the work on the gas filling unit came handy with the increase in demand for the fuel.
As he said, the supplier was forced to adjust the execution time of the work and the gas filling work, to accommodate the safety of its workers.
“For safety reasons, the works cannot run simultaneously with the process of filling the cylinders, in order to preserve the lives and physical integrity of our workers. Therefore, at this moment, we think it is better to fill the bottles at night and the works take place during the day,” said Paulo Varela.
We will do whatever is necessary to stabilise this excessive demand for gas, even within the limitations we face
Despite the supplier having adjusted the period for filling gas into cylinders and the execution of the works, for safety reasons, there was, according to the Galp representative, an increase in supply between Saturday and Monday, even to meet demand.
The source said, for example, that over the last few days the market had received 9,000 cylinders per day, compared to the previous seven 7,000.
“Not because we are offering less, because over the last three days we have put, on the market, around 27,000 cylinders, which corresponds to nine 9,000 per day, differently to the usual,” he added.
Varela gave assurances that gas would continue to be available, and said that the aim now was for bottles to be filled with the necessary stock during the night in order to prevent a shortage of the product at the points of sale.
If on the one hand Galp is redoubling efforts to minimise the shortage of gas in the Greater Maputo region, consumers on the other hand are still feeling the lack of the product. Even without a certain date, the Galp representative promised that the situation will improve in the coming days.
“We will do whatever is necessary to stabilise this excessive demand for gas, even within the limitations we are facing related to the course of the works.”
According to Paulo Varela, Galp Mozambique knows that the situation has usually led to speculation in the sale price of gas. Therefore, the company is working with government authorities to prevent any kind of opportunism.
The government is aware of the shortage of cooking gas in the Maputo metropolitan region and says it has already held meetings with supplier Galp, with a view to overcoming the problem. The expansion of production capacity was the recommendation left by the Executive and it believes that it is being implemented, hence it has already set dates to put an end to the problem.
“We are working with the company to reformulate the shifts with the perspective of also reducing the hours of the work that is to give space to have another shift for filling, so that we leave from a condition of seven thousand to about eight to nine thousand bottles per day. This would break this sensation of scarcity of this resource on the market,” explained Moisés Paulino, the national director for Hydrocarbons and Fuels, concluding, without reservations, that “by Wednesday, this situation of high demand will be history.
At a national level, the director for Hydrocarbons and Fuels of the Ministry for Mineral Resources and Energy said there was no gas crisis, because the country currently has a margin of up to 25 days and, within 10 days, more ships may arrive with this fuel.
