ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Spurred by growing gas demand to over six billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) and depleting production from developed hydrocarbon resources, the government has adopted a multi-pronged strategy to ease energy crisis.
The government had to resort to importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to meet energy needs besides pursuing on long-term projects such as Pakistan-Iran gas pipelines, TAPI project and so many measures on domestic front.
Previous governments made attempts to import LNG but they failed for adopting integrated approach where LNG terminal developer was also LNG supplier, says an official source.
But the present government won laurels, succeeding to perform the task and provided the country with its first LNG based gas within 20 months since it came to power.
The government pursued a transparent process for developing a terminal and the Engro Elengy built the SSGC LNG regasification terminal in a record time as the contract was signed on April 2014 and first gas flow was ensured at March this year.
The source said the government needed to sign five more contracts to import LNG, as currently LNG cater to the 20 percent of the country’s energy needs.
The government plans to build one terminal at Port Qasim and other in Gawadar port to handle over 2 bcfd of LNG which would help augment gas supply and overcome shortfall, he adds.
On Pak-Iran gas pipelines project, the government had done its work on             its part, awaiting only sanctions on Iran were either relaxed or lifted altogether and work on the ambitions project would move ahead at a fast pace.
Above all, it is a real feather in the government’s cap to have broken ground, recently, for TAPI- Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipelines project to get 1,325 mmcfd of gas per day out of total volume of 3.2 billion cubic feet to the component countries.
The official said the government was proud of the achievement as the ambitious project lingered on for the last 25 years, but now things had started going smoothly and the first gas flow was planned by December 2019, the official added.
Claiming the TAPI as the largest yet project in the world, the official said Turkeministan would also invest around $25 to deliver gas to the energy hungry countries of the project for 25 years.
The government has also awarded several exploration licenses to explore more hydrocarbon resources and augment domestic production which is currently stagnant at 4bcfd.
Since refining industry is not performing optimally with all the refineries had gone outdated and were operating at low throughput capacity, resulting to additional import of petroleum products.
The government is taking solid measures to refurbish refining industry, gearing it up to process maximum quantity of crude oil.
Source: APP
