ISLAMABAD, Dec 18: Pakistan will be saving $600-700 million per annum in forex from December 2003, with an additional supply of natural gas to the existing system that will replace the imported fuel oil.

Secretary Petroleum M. Abdullah Yousaf said on Wednesday that Pakistan might not need to import natural gas and rather export it in next few years as a result of coal gasification at Thar.

He said drilling results indicated some big petroleum discoveries in offshore exploration in the coming months. “We are very hopeful and Totalfina elf (the French operator of two offshore blocks) is excited about the results coming in,” said the secretary.

Abdullah Yousaf was briefing newsmen about a day-long stakeholders workshop on energy sector reforms and restructuring plan sponsored by the World Bank, to be held on Thursday.

The secretary said the workshop was aimed at having feedback from various stakeholders to review, revise and reform the already completed oil and gas sector restructuring programme and start the second phase of deregulation and restructuring. He did not elaborate the second phase.

He admitted that regulators were experimenting things in which obviously mistakes were also made. However, he said goals were eventually clear and the system would improve in the end, but this could not happen overnight.

The goals, he said, were to avoid crutches, guaranteed rates of returns and subsidies to various sectors, but there was still a long way to go on that account.

He said main emphasis of the reforms programme was to maximise the indigenous natural resource utilisation and the additional gas supply to power plants by December next would reduce fuel oil import bill by $600-700 million per annum.

The secretary said two different plans had been taken in hand to develop, the world’s 5th largest, 175 billion tons coal reserves in Thar, which could not be exported due to its low quality.

He said Chinese were working to use them for power generation which too had utilisation limits. He said that a German company had also been involved to gasify the coal reserves through Lurgi technology in which the gasification had been done without even mining of the coal field.