A day after relevant cabinet members talked about impending crisis of gas, Prime Minister Imran Khan also warned that the country would face severe gas crisis in the coming winter and the year after, stressing the need for consensus among provinces and the Centre on important national issues, including electricity and gas. Speaking at a seminar on ‘Sustainability, Security and Affordability of Natural Gas Supply in Pakistan’ on Wednesday, he also called for national debate on subsidies that were fuelling a circular debt crisis.
Similar views were expressed by Special Assistance to Prime Minister on Petroleum Division, Nadeem Babar, during a meeting of the Council of Common Interests (CCI) last month (August) where he spoke about a major gas crisis in coming winter emphasizing the need to build a national consensus on a major push for new exploration and production ventures, conservation of domestic gas and rationalization of price mechanism to avert the crisis. There is no doubt that the domestic gas reserves are depleting fast triggering fear that even the gas producing provinces would face shortage as experienced by Punjab within the next few years. There is surely need for long-term planning to ensure gas security because of negative impact of the supply crisis on economy and households that use gas as fuel in kitchens. In this backdrop, the holding of the seminar on the issue has afforded an opportunity to experts and policy-makers to share their views on this critical issue and the discussion might prove a step towards forging national consensus on the subject. Long term planning must not only focus on accelerating the pace of exploration and production but also improvement and upgradation of the highly leaking pipeline network. It is because of leaking distribution system that the country is witnessing about ten per cent growth in gas losses dubbed as “Unaccounted for Gas”.
Until and unless, distribution system is improved and leakages are plugged, there would be no benefit of increasing the supply side as any increase in pressure to ensure availability of gas to tale end consumers would mean more leakages. There are also dare-devil thefts of gas not just in houses and commercial premises but entire localities are consuming unmetered gas with many of them even running factories on gas with no or nominal payments. Leaving long-term planning apart, the impending crisis can be averted if the wiser thinking at the highest level regarding irrelevancy of Article 158 of the Constitution that promised priority rights to gas producing provinces leads to a consensus for equitable sharing of reserves and shortage. Secondly, instead of mere sensitizing and preparing consumers for massive gas load-shedding in winter, the authorities have time to move fast and ensure adequate supply of imported gas for induction into local system. As for subsidies for power sector, there would be no need for them if the Government succeeds in checking corruption, reducing staggering line losses and eliminating Kunda system.
