Category: Recent Post

After a prolonged suspension of close to 14 months in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) $6 billion extended fund facility (EFF) to Pakistan, a staff-level agreement to release the third tranche of $500 million was reached this week. The resumption in the facility comes after the PTI government, after having resisted at first, was forced to hike power tariffs, energy prices and taxes. The most recent increase in the power tariff of Rs1.95 per unit, a 15% increase, was across the board, which meant that for the first time in…

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CPEC projects not only bring electricity to us, but also train professionals, and contribute to the well-being of local people for Pakistan, said Muhammad Muneeb, a senior official of Sahiwal Coal-fired Power Station, who awarded the Outstanding Pakistani Employee of CPEC Project by the Chinese Embassy, according to a report published by Gwadar Pro on Saturday. The Sahiwal project, initiated in 2015, plays a crucial role in domestic electricity supply. Muneeb introduced to Gwadar Pro that Sahiwal lies in the industrial hub region between Lahore, Multan and Faisalabad. Its location…

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Energy security appears to be the biggest challenge confronting the country since long. The following paragraphs are an attempt at a quick health check of Pakistan’s energy supply chain and recommending the way forward. Despite all of our cash flow issues and heavy debt, we have somehow ended up with a highly lethal energy mix which compels us to spend around $16 billion on fuel imports annually. The main reason is that during the past more than 40 years, instead of considering a long-term strategy and its execution, we have…

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With dwindling gas resources and lack of discovery of new oil and gas resources, energy dependence will increase unless dedicated efforts are made to discover new resources and increase the utilisation of existing resources. Pakistan has one of the largest lignite (brown coal) resources, which can be termed almost limitless (185 billion tons). Despite this, coal imports have been increasing and are projected to increase to 20 million tons ($2 billion) in the current year. It is due to installation of power plants based on imported coal unnecessarily in the…

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The neighbouring countries are treating hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), plugged-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) in the same fashion. While creating a base for future autonomous connected vehicles and the related infrastructure, Pakistan should not be too off the mark if it wants to promote environment-friendly vehicles. This was the concluding remark by Indus Motor Company (IMC) CEO Ali Asghar Jamali in a recent interview with Dawn. Mr Jamali spoke about IMC’s focus on HEVs instead of EVs, cost difference between HEVs and EVs, infrastructure issues, policies, incentives…

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