Pakistan's Sui Gas Reserves May Last Another Ten Years

Pakistan’s biggest natural gas reservoirs in Sui district of Balochistan will deplete by 2022, a top petroleum ministry official said, further raising concerns about country’s energy needs.

Adviser to Prime Minister on Petroleum and Natural Resources Dr Asim Hussain told a parliamentary panel here on Friday that gas wells in Sui were already drying up and production was going down at the rate of 5% a year, Express Tribune reported. The news comes at a time when Pakistan is facing a severe energy crisis.

“With this situation, what I can share with you is that reserves in Sui will exhaust in 10 years … we will have to look for other options before it happens,” the adviser suggested during a meeting of the National Assembly standing committee on inter-provincial coordination.

In the meeting, the committee members including Chairman Ahmadan Bugti expressed concern over the disclosure and asked the government to diversify the energy mix by exploiting other sources like wind and coal.

Some of them called for accelerating gas exploration not only in Sui and Dera Bugti districts, but also at other places in Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa where the possibility of finding energy reserves existed, the newspaper report said.