THE gas shortages in Punjab have created a dire situation where people have to manage without the fuel to cook food or heat homes and water when temperatures are hitting lows of four degrees Celsius.

The situation was aggravated in the past seven days due to an outage at the Sui gas field that caused a drop of almost 250 million cubic feet of gas per day in the system, although that problem appears to have been rectified as of Thursday. But the shortages are growing by the year.

In December 2011, for example, the size of the nationwide shortfall crossed a benchmark of one billion cubic feet per day. This winter it crossed 2bcfd, meaning it doubled in three years.

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At least a quarter of this growth in demand was the result of new gas connections granted by the previous government. The present government has also abandoned any effort to freeze the grant of new gas connections, because the pressures creating the demand are too powerful to resist through simple executive actions.

Only a few days ago, the MD of SNGPL said he had a backlog of 1.5m applications for new connections. By all accounts, demand for natural gas will continue to grow exponentially in the years to come.

But all is not lost. Some steps to increase supplies are seeing credible movement. An LNG import terminal, with a capacity of 600mmcfd, is scheduled to become operational by end January. A pipeline to bring an additional 1.3bcfd from Turkmenistan is moving ahead as well, although a significant question mark hangs over the project. But even in the best-case scenario, these projects will plug today’s shortfall by 2017, by which time the gap would have grown bigger still.

In fact, all steps being taken to increase supplies will always lag behind the pace of demand. Therefore, it is important to realise that the shortages have become a permanent feature of our lives. In an era of ever-dwindling supplies, it is necessary to think about adapting to the shortages in addition to increasing supplies.

Reducing leakages from the distribution system and urging efficiency in the utilisation of gas is crucial. But these priorities need to be supplemented by proper pricing reform as well as improved building codes to ensure that new homes are more heat-efficient. Weaning ourselves off our addiction to natural gas will not be easy, but it is the only way forward.

Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2014