Jumpin' Jack Flash

We use quite a lot of bottled gas - specifically butane - and I think we're more or less legal. The original bottles came with a contract, rather than from some car boot sale, and we have the installation tested every five years. Were it all to explode—and an alarming number of collapsing buildings are attributed to gas explosions each year —the insurance companies might just pay out. That is, provided we didn't die in a hailstorm of shards of severed metal. When I think about it that's probably more likely than an insurance company actually paying out.

I always hope that the reason there are so many explosions is not that bottled gas is inherently dangerous, but that people are a bit gung ho about it. They buy the bottles secondhand somewhere to avoid the regular checks, don’t worry about the “sell by” dates on the rubber hoses, never replace the valves or worry about their pressure ratings and even tape things together with duct tape.

We use gas for the water heater and for the hob on our cooker. We also have three portable gas heaters. We used to be very frugal with our use of gas bottles, but nowadays we—well, I—tend towards profligacy. Maggie doesn’t really like the gas fires; she says they produce toxic gases which are trying to kill her. In the meantime they make her eyes water. We now have better systems to warm most rooms, but the gas stoves do have the advantage of being nearly instantaneous. Producing radiant heat, as they do, you can huddle close, while the room is still cold, and the heater bangs out the heat to warm the space around you in no time at all. The gas fires give the air conditioning units or the pellet burner time to do their stuff and pump some warm air into the whole space.

The price of gas, sold in containers of between 8 and 20 kilos of gas is controlled by central government. This includes the standard 12.5 kilo bombona that most households use. Cylinders outside that range—those with less than eight kilos, such as the small camping bottles, or the larger industrial ones—are not subject to the government cap and their prices are set freely by the market.

The gas price is updated on the third Tuesday of the month every two months, with the official figure adjusted in line with market prices and other factors. Occasionally the gas gets cheaper, but mostly it becomes more expensive. There is a cap of five per cent on each price movement so that there are no sudden jumps. Any rise or fall above that threshold is carried over to the next review.

This figure is not just the cost of the gas itself, but the outcome of a formula that takes into account the international price of butane and propane, the cost of transport and insurance, the euro–dollar exchange rate, and an allowance for distribution and handling. These commercialisation costs, as they are known, are built into the official price. On top of that, there is a hydrocarbon tax of about one and a half cents per kilo, and then, inevitably, 21% VAT is added to the whole lot. So, when the price is published in the Official Bulletin that's the price you might expect to pay. But it isn't.

I only know of two, maybe three, Spanish suppliers - CEPSA and Repsol are the big players and both of them are petrol companies trying quite hard to pretend that they have nothing to do with fossil fuels. They advertise solar panels, and one, CEPSA, is so keen to change image that it has adopted a new name and has relogoed all its petrol stations. They both sell cylinders of 12.5 kilos, although I’ve had blokes (it's always been blokes) from both companies tell me their cylinders contain more than the opposition’s. The interesting thing, though, is the variation in price. In the same month, with no change in the Government fixed price, I paid 16.70€ and 20.50€ for Repsol gas, and 19.35€ for CEPSA gas from three different suppliers. 

I asked, at the cheapest, why he was nearly 4€ cheaper than another nearby supplier, and he said it was because the gas he was selling was in an older, heavier design of cylinder. “Ah, so there’s more gas in the newer, lighter bottles?” “No, it’s just the construction of the bottle that’s different," he said. To be honest I thought it was gibberish. I was sure there must be some logical reason for the cost above that set official price and it couldn't possibly be because of one container was older than another. It's amazing how convoluted the information is about the gas price. I've had Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity arguing with each other about what one of the others has told me. If they were schoolboys they'd have handed their blazers to seconds and had a playground fight. I've thought, at points as I've been writing this blog, that the answer was to do with the hydrocarbon tax or the addition of  VAT at the end of the process. Now I've decided it's simply that the official, regulated price (currently 17.11€ including VAT and hydrocarbon tax) is a sham and and that it's effectively a minimum rather than a maximum price. The price differences are explained by undisclosed delivery fees, handling charges, and differences in bottle design (the older heavier bottles really can be cheaper; my man was telling the truth). Or to put it another way any outlet jacks the price up as much as it believes the punters will pay.  

It's interesting that one of the first things that all the explanations use for the price difference is the delivery charge. Most Spaniards get their refills delivered to the door. We’ve never had the gas delivered, although I suspect our time will come when we need the strong, young butaneros to carry the cylinders around. The full ones must weigh in at something like 22 kilos, and they are not very manageable. At the moment we take an empty bottle back to the bodega, the farm shop, petrol station or one of the gas deposit places where the empty cylinder is exchanged for a full one.

And the title? Jumpin' Jack Flash -  It's a gas, gas, gas.