Month: July 2020

ISLAMABAD: The federal cabinet has deferred a decision to increase price of electricity for consumers of the K-Electric (KE) – the power utility that provides electricity to Karachi – and to put an additional burden of Rs73 billion on people of the metropolis who are already facing acute power outages. According to sources in the federal government, the cabinet meeting that Prime Minister Imran Khan chaired on Tuesday discussed proposed increase in tariff by the KE in view of the cost of gas it has to import to meet the…

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Pakistan has passed two laws that could radically change how water is managed, but they leave many questions unanswered.Pakistan ranks fourth in the world in terms of annual groundwater abstraction — the amount of water taken from an underground source. This puts it in close competition with larger countries such as India, China and the United States. It is also the world’s largest exporter of groundwater, which reflects the volume of groundwater used in the country’s water-intensive export products such as rice, leather and textiles. Clearly, access to groundwater is…

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Panels of the OPEC+ groups begin their monthly meetings on Tuesday to discuss the state of oil market and how to proceed with the record production cuts, with analysts widely expecting that the group will ease the cuts by 2 million barrels per day as of August 1. The Joint Technical Committee (JTC) will hold a meeting on Tuesday, followed by a meeting of the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) on Wednesday. The volatile oil market and the highly uncertain trajectory of global demand recovery has forced the OPEC+ group…

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OPEC+ will hold a committee meeting this week to assess the status of the oil market and decide on its next steps. For now, the group appears ready to begin unwinding the extraordinary production cuts, which could test the recent price rally. The historic cuts of 9.7 million barrels per day (mb/d) that OPEC+ implemented after the pandemic-related crash was always intended to be temporary. Initially, the cuts were set to expire at the end of June and begin tapering at the start of July; the group agreed to extend…

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