Month: September 2020

Industrial waste can turn planet-warming carbon dioxide into stone

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In July 2019, Gregory Dipple, a geologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, hopped on a 119-seat charter flight in Yellowknife, Canada, and flew 280 kilometers northeast to the Gahcho Kué diamond mine, just south of the Arctic Circle. Gahcho Kué, which means “place of the big rabbits” in the Dënësu¸łinë language of the region’s native Dené or Chipewyan people, is an expansive open pit mine ringed by sky-blue lakes. There, the mining company De Beers unearths some 4 million carats’ worth of diamonds annually. But Dipple and two…

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Gas infrastructure remains underdeveloped as Rs818bn GIDC awaits intended use

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During the last nine years, the federal government has collected Rs818 billion as Gas Infrastructure Development Cess (GIDC), however, it has failed to invest the collected amount towards improving and building the country’s gas infrastructure. According to well-placed sources, the volume of collectable GIDC from various sectors was increased to Rs517 billion on March 31, 2020. However, till now none of the GIDC reserves have been utilised for the purpose they were collected for.  According to documents, the previous government collected Rs295 billion as GIDC and employed it for budgetary…

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Pakistan faces long-term overcapacity: IEEEFA

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Pakistan risks locking itself into building more power capacity than it needs as a result of over-optimistic energy demand growth forecasts that do not take into account the impact of Covid-19, according to a new IEEFA report. Pakistan’s state-owned National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) published its latest long-term power plan – the Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP) 2047 – in April 2020. The policy document fails to live up to the government’s stated principles of sustainability and affordability, IEEFA report author Simon Nicholas, energy finance analyst at the Institute…

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The case for the private import of LNG

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Pakistan’s natural gas demand-supply gap, currently at 1,440 MMCFD, is projected to rise to 3,684 MMCFD by 2024-25 and 5,389 MMCFD by 2029-30. For a country that relies on indigenous and imported gas for more than 40% of its energy requirements, this is an alarming situation. And it has been here for some time now. In fact, the country’s industrial sector has been reeling from the constraint for the better part of this decade as even with the induction of imported RLNG in 2015 the country is far from overcoming…

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Punjab govt to opt for solar power

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LAHORE: Over 93000 electricity connections with annual bill of Rs 30 billion have propelled the Punjab government to opt for solarization as the way forward in order to reduce electricity bills and improve the environment, said provincial energy department sources. According to the sources, 13 public sector universities with 26 megawatt potential have initiated solarization projects. The Punjab government is set to functionalize 2.5 megawatt solar plant by March 2021 at Islamia University Bahawalpur, they added. Already, they said 8000 public sector schools in Punjab have been converted to solar.…

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