KARACHI, Jan 21: The Sui Southern Gas Company and consumers seem to be on a collision course as the gas utility refuses to accept their contention that they had not only been kept in the dark by the company when they received natural gas of lower heating value but had also been made to pay inflated bills.

The SSGC officials that Dawn spoke to shrugged off blame for lower heating value of natural gas, arguing that under the terms and conditions stipulated in the contract the SSGC was not supposed to provide natural gas of a certain heating value, also referred to as calorific value in technical parlance.

They added that since March 2000 the company had been receiving gas from the Zamzama field whose heating value was less than the heating value of gas from the Sui field. As a result, the average heating value of the gas mix had lowered.

According to an SSGC presentation report, the calorific value of the Zamzama gas field is 808 British Thermal Units, and that of the Sui gas field is 984 British Thermal Units.

Talking to Dawn, the chairman of the SITE association of industry, Arshad A. Vohra, said the SSGC should have notified its consumers when it had started mixing higher calorific value natural gas from the Sui field with lower calorific value natural gas from the Zamzama field.

He said: “This act of the SSGC is a breach of trust by the utility. Besides, by not informing the industrial consumers of the actual situation of the gas quality in the SSGC system, the utility has lost its image.”

The SSGC officials said they were meeting the representatives of the industrial consumers shortly to inform them that the company had been under no contractual obligation to inform them about the change of calorific value. “The SSGC used to sell natural gas in terms of volume and the heating value of the gas was never considered,” they explained.

Analysts argued that during the period the SSGC had supplied natural gas of lower heating value to its consumers, it had made a lot of money because it purchased natural gas from exploration and production companies in terms of its calorific value and not in terms of its volume. “All the SSGC needs to do is return that additional amount of money to consumers who have been clamouring for compensation,” they contended.

The SSGC officials brushed aside this argument of the analysts, saying that there had been a time when the gas utility had purchased extremely high calorific value natural gas to sell it to consumers in terms of volume. “Being a government-owned utility, it never unnecessarily passed on the effect of price hike to consumers,” they said.

The SSGC changed its billing mechanism with effect from Jan 1. Now the utility will sell natural gas to its consumers in terms of its heating value, measured in British Thermal Units, and not in terms of its volume, measured in million cubic feet per day.