Propane Industry News

Tucker Perkins on training gaps, the power generation opportunity, and why propane’s best years are still ahead. 

Tucker Perkins grew up in propane. His father spent more than 40 years with the same company. By the time Tucker was five years old, he was already spending time at the yard.

And then he deliberately walked away from it.

When he finished college, his father was president of that same company. Tucker didn’t want to be the president’s son. He wanted to earn his own way. So he became a consulting engineer, worked in land development, and eventually moved into natural gas, building pipelines and working with LNG.

He came back when the new president at his father’s former company recruited him and offered him, almost word for word, the exact three roles he’d walked into that interview hoping to ask for. He spent the next stretch of his career growing that business from five offices and roughly 50 million gallons to operations across more than 40 states and 350 million gallons.

When the parent company was acquired, Tucker didn’t go with the buyer. He walked away and started over, building a new retail propane operation from the ground up, one employee at a time, eventually growing it to about 75 people before taking the helm at PERC in 2017.

He’s seen this industry from every angle that exists. That’s exactly why the conversation Brian and Justin had with him on a recent Drop Point episode is worth paying attention to.

PERC Exists to Serve the Marketer

Before getting into specifics, Tucker made one thing clear: everything PERC does is ultimately built to benefit the propane marketer. The safety programs, the training infrastructure, the market development specialists who will ride along on sales calls with you, all of it is funded by the industry, and PERC has never lost sight of that.

“It’s not PERC’s money,” he said. “It’s the industry’s money. And we understand crystal clear how hard that money is to come by.”

Safety and training are not profit centers. They’re industry infrastructure. If you’re not using what PERC has built, you’re leaving something on the table that your customers already paid for.

The Training Gap Nobody Wants to Admit

One of the sharper moments in the conversation came when Brian mentioned that a number of propane companies he works with still don’t know that CETP was replaced by PEP. Tucker wasn’t dismissive about it. He called it a communications challenge and owned PERC’s part in it. But for a company carrying that gap, the consequences are real.

PERC training for propane companies used to follow a fairly uniform structure. CETP ran eight to twelve hours, covered broad ground, and was instructor-led. PEP replaced it with a modular, digital format organized by role. A bobtail driver no longer sits through training built for a service tech. A new employee can get into their specific job description faster, complete modules on a flexible schedule, and build from there over time.

The flexibility is genuinely useful, but as Bryan Cordill discussed in an earlier Drop Point conversation, someone in the company has to own the decision of what to assign and to whom. If nobody does, the flexibility becomes a liability.

What compounds the problem: most operators still don’t know that PEP enrollment is free. The Everyday Safe program, the PERC Learning Center, state-specific learning paths, the technical school grant program, none of these are subscriptions. They’re already funded. If you’re not using them, you’re not saving money. You’re forfeiting access to something your customers paid into.

Safety As a Culture, Not a Line Item

The Everyday Safe program wasn’t built because things were going fine. Tucker was direct: the industry has seen a run-up in accidents resulting in explosions and fatalities, alongside an increase in slips, trips, and falls. The program exists to keep safety visible at every level of an operation, every single day, not just when something goes wrong.

His challenge to operators on safety spending reframes the whole question: “Maximize your safety to minimize your costs.”

If the owner doesn’t genuinely believe in safety and communicate that to the team, training becomes a box that gets checked once a year. It doesn’t change behavior in the field. The companies that get this right don’t treat safety as something they do. It becomes part of how everything gets done.

The Technology Combination That Actually Moves the Needle

Tucker’s answer on the most important piece of technology in propane right now wasn’t complicated: tank monitors married to routing software.

Monitors tell you which customers need service and which ones don’t. Routing software turns that data into efficient runs. Together they reduce out-of-gas calls, cut unnecessary windshield time, and allow a lean operation to do more with the same number of trucks and drivers. In a year where the industry saw extreme weather on both ends, the operators with that data were able to respond before demand got away from them.

On AI, Tucker’s near-term view is practical: predictive routing, not science fiction. The ability to factor weather forecasts into delivery decisions before a storm arrives is where AI has immediate and real value for a propane marketer today.

The Opportunity Most Operators Haven’t Acted On Yet

If there’s one part of this conversation worth reading twice, it’s the section on power generation.

The electrical grid is aging, increasingly unreliable, and rising in cost. AI infrastructure, electric vehicles, and industrial expansion are drawing on a system that wasn’t built to sustain that kind of demand. Propane can be stored, transported, and deployed anywhere without pipeline constraints, and the equipment side has already moved to meet that opportunity.

Tucker is watching order flow from port tractors running on propane and fielding calls from gymnasiums, hospitals, farms, and food service operations asking how propane can solve their power reliability problem. His framing was unambiguous: “This opportunity is knocking on their door. It doesn’t have the potential. It is knocking on their door.”

For a propane marketer who has always thought of themselves as a residential heat company, the question Tucker is really asking is whether that identity is limiting what they’re willing to see.

Where the Industry is Actually Headed 

Tucker closed the conversation with an outlook built on data, not optimism. Propane supply is rising. Prices have been stable while diesel, gasoline, and electricity have swung. Natural gas pipeline expansion is constrained. Hydrogen has lost momentum. Battery electric is running into real-world limitations. Propane keeps showing up in the gap.

GM recently debuted engine technology with a propane variant representing a commitment Tucker described as being in the range of two billion dollars. That’s not a company experimenting. That’s a company placing a serious bet on propane’s role across agriculture, transportation, and power generation.

His summary of the industry’s position: “We are not even in the warmups of the nine innings that will be the best nine innings we’ve ever had.”

The one thing standing in the way, he said, is complacency. The operators most comfortable with their current size and customer mix are the ones most at risk of being in a great market and missing it entirely.

What Every Propane Marketer Should Do Right Now

When Tucker was asked what he’d change if he could get every propane company to do one thing differently, his answer had nothing to do with training programs, technology adoption, or market expansion. It was simpler: listen to your customers.

Those customers who want to text instead of call, the ones asking about tank monitors, the businesses in your area whose operations could support autogas or power generation, the customers requesting online ordering or new payment options. Those signals are already there in every market, for every size of operation.

The tools to respond are available. The resources to train your team are funded and waiting. The market opportunities Tucker described don’t require a company to be large to participate. What they do require is paying attention to what’s already right in front of you.

Tucker Perkins is the President and CEO of PERC. You can reach PERC directly at propane.com. If you want a conversation about your training program, your compliance posture, or where opportunities like power generation or autogas might fit your operation, that’s exactly the kind of conversation Brian and Justin at 1075 Consulting have every day.  Schedule a free discovery call here.