PNG (PNG)

Piped Natural Gas (PNG) is natural gas — predominantly methane — delivered to end users through underground low-pressure pipelines rather than through cylinders or tankers. In India, PNG is one of two retail offerings of the City Gas Distribution sector regulated by PNGRB, the other being CNG for vehicles. PNG is supplied at 21 mbar at the kitchen tap for domestic users, scaled up to 4-19 bar for commercial and industrial connections, and uses dedicated medium-density polyethylene service lines with a typical operating life of 50 years.

PNG comes in three regulated categories. Domestic PNG reaches roughly 12 million household connections as of 2024, displacing LPG for cooking at tariffs commonly 30-40% below LPG cylinder economics. Commercial PNG serves hotels, restaurants, hospitals and small establishments. Industrial PNG supplies boilers, furnaces, captive power plants and process heating, often through dedicated steel spurs. Pricing for PNG-Domestic is anchored to Administered Price Mechanism gas (APM, linked to the Kirit Parikh Committee formula at present), while commercial and industrial categories pay market-discovered prices.

For CBG producers, PNG infrastructure is the cheapest distribution route to retail consumers because the pipework, billing and customer relationships already exist. SATAT now explicitly allows CBG injection into PNG networks alongside CNG-station delivery, with the CGD licensee receiving credit for the bio-component and the producer earning the SATAT-notified price. The injected gas must meet IS 16087:2016, be odorised with ethyl mercaptan at 10-25 ppm for leak detectability, and pass online Wobbe Index and oxygen-content monitoring at the entry point.

The strategic trade-off lies in volume versus margin. PNG networks have steady, year-round demand and lower truck-logistics cost than cascade-cylinder delivery to CNG stations, but the CGD licensee captures the retail margin, leaving the CBG producer with the SATAT base price net of wheeling charges of roughly ₹2-3 per kg. For plants well above 5 TPD of CBG within 25 km of a high-pressure line, injection is almost always more profitable than trucking, while smaller or remote plants are stranded with cylinder logistics or local industrial offtake at unregulated prices.