ONE would have to look really hard to find any glimmer of hope in the latest remarks by Petroleum Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi.

Sui Northern, or SNGPL, the company responsible for gas distribution in Punjab and KP provinces, will have barely enough gas to meet the requirements of domestic consumers, and there will be none left for any other category of consumers throughout the winter.

Gas prices cannot be revised downward for exporters, the minister says, because this would place too large a burden on the exchequer.

Take a look: No gas for industrial consumers this winter: minister

Shale production is not economically feasible in the context of low oil prices. System losses in SNGPL have increased over the past five years, but he is powerless to reprimand the managing director of the company. That job must go through the company’s board, which, Mr Abbasi alleges, is populated with people having vested interests and looking after their personal concerns and nothing more.

To top it all off, his pet project on the LNG import terminal is increasingly coming under the glare of an indignant public fed up with publicly funded energy projects that are unable to begin commercial operations.

The lack of good news was not unexpected. But what is surprising is that we are still talking about the problems, and tossing around various hypothetical solutions such as regulating LPG all over again as an alternative to natural gas, past the midpoint of this government’s term.

This state of affairs was known many years ago, long before the current government came to power, and yet the minister is talking about these problems as if they materialised only yesterday.

By now we reasonably expected that the conversation would be about the progress made towards resolving these problems, but it seems we still have not moved forward.

The fact that this is happening in the third year of the government’s rule shows a grave situation has developed in the energy sector, and his own words at the news conference indicated that the minister has precious little to show by way of progress.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015

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