January 31, 2002	Thursday	Ziqa’ad 16, 1422

ISLAMABAD, Jan 30: Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiya will be visiting Pakistan next month to follow up a $3.2-billion Gulf-South Asia Pipeline (Gusa) project and oil sale to Pakistan.

Before his visit, most likely in the third week of February, a coordination committee of Pakistan, Qatar and Crescent Petroleum of Sharjah will meet in Islamabad before February 15 to speed up progress on Gusa project, sources told Dawn.

The committee, comprising officials of Pakistani and Qatari oil ministries and Crescent, was constituted during the visit of Petroleum Minister Usman Aminuddin to Doha early this month. The committee was required to meet within 30 days.

Pakistan has asked Qatar to provide certain concessions and security to pipeline, gas supply and prices, and the forthcoming committee meeting would discuss these issues.

Qatar has also offered oil supplies to Pakistan as it wanted to diversify its sources for security reasons. The Qatari minister would be discussing various options on that account with his Pakistani counterpart and the Petroleum Ministry officials, sources said.

Official sources confirmed the visit of Qatari oil minister in the second part of next month, but said dates were being firmed up at the moment. These sources said that Qatari prime minister had asked Pakistan to play a middleman’s role by purchasing gas from Qatar and selling it to Indian market.

The Sharjah-based Crescent Petroleum had submitted a draft agreement to Islamabad in July last year to lay a 1,610-km pipeline of 44” dia offshore along the Iran-Pakistan coastal line up to Jiwani, near Karachi, to transport 1.6 bcf (billion cubic feet) natural gas with an offtake of 1,000 mmcfd (million cubic feet per day) from year 2005 onward.

Qatar, host to one of the largest US-Army positioning bases in the world, possesses the third largest natural gas reserves in the world or 50 per cent more than those of the entire United States. It eyes on becoming a major petroleum player in the coming decade with prospects of the world’s richest nation in per-capita gross domestic product.

Towards that end, state-owned Qatar Petroleum and the UAE-controlled Dolphin Energy Ltd. signed recently agreements for the multi-billion dollar Dolphin gas supply project. The two sides signed a 25-year agreement to supply the UAE with Qatari gas from the North Field and a construction contract for around 450-km pipeline to carry the gas to Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The issue of gas tariff between the Qatar government and the Crescent Group has been hindering the execution of Gusa project but a reasonable progress is reported to have been made on that account, sources said.