Pakistan’s Hydrocarbon Consumption and Production: Closing the Gap

  • Kunwar Idris

Abstract

   Despite a meager per capita annual commercial energy consumption of 0.25 tonnes of oil equivalent, Pakistan imports one-third of its requirement. The daily oil consumption, presently, is around 250,000 barrels or 123 million tonnes a year. The indigenous production in the recent times touched a peak of 65,000 barrels/day before it fell back to 61,000 barrels (average of1991-92).
The daily gas production at 1,500 million cubic feet is equal to 12 million tonnes of oil a year. About three-fourths of oil and its products are being imported. The current remaining proven reserves are 158 million barrels of oil and 24 TCF of gas. More need to be discovered and developed to avert an adverse change in the present import-local production ratio because of the annual consumption increasing by 8 to 9 percent.
The present annual refining capacity is barely 6.5 million tonnes. The transportation and storage capacities also do not match the demand. Plans are now on the drawing board, or in hand, to increase the refining capacity to 16 million tonnes by the turn of century with proportionate expansion in import, storage and transmission capabilities.
The coal potential of the country has been estimated at some 20 billion tonnes which though of poor quality yet could form an indigenous resource to replace fuel oil in power generation.

 

Published
1993-07-01
Section
Articles