Controversial Kishenganga and Ratle hydropower projects: WB to hand over projects’ papers to arbiters, neutral experts on 21st

 The World Bank is to formally hand over to the Court of Arbitration (CoA) and Neutral Expert (NE) on November 21, 2022, the documents related to the dispute between Pakistan and India on the designs of controversial projects — 330 MW Kishenganga and 850MW Ratle Hydropower projects. The expert teams of both the parties to the dispute, Pakistan and India, would attend the ‘Handover briefing by WB to the Court of Arbitration and Neutral Expert (NE)’ — the two forums available under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960 to resolve the…

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Power Division Refuses to Collect Fuel Oil From Refineries

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Power Division has refused to collect furnace oil (FO) from local refineries for power plants if they did not come on the merit list, The News learnt on Wednesday.The piling up of furnace oil at local refineries, especially at Attock Refinery Limited (ARL) has turned into a crisis for the local refining sector. A meeting of local refineries was held with the Power Division and Petroleum Division of the Ministry of Energy on Wednesday to ponder over the situation. According to sources familiar with the deliberations at the meeting, the…

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Oil Industry Protests ‘Forced’ Price Freeze

The country’s oil industry on Wednesday protested over the “manipulation” of the pricing mechanism by the government in its latest fortnightly review to maintain existing ex-depot rates of petroleum products for the next 15 days. “This forced stabilisation of oil prices at the cost of the industry is not sustainable and will severely impact the already crippled oil industry,” wrote the Oil Companies Advisory Council (OCAC) — an umbrella organisation of more than three dozen oil marketing companies (OMCs) and refineries — to the Ministry of Energy on Wednesday. The…

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Building blocks of sustainable power future for Pakistan

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Every time a new government takes control of our country, it starts to reinvent the wheel, always with new zeal and zest. It vows to revolutionize the country in a matter of months, not years, with slogans like (in no particular order) “turn around Pakistan”, ‘make Pakistan an Asian tiger”, “a job paradise for foreigners”, and the list goes on ad infinitum. Taskforces are formed overnight to work on “war footings”, mostly composed of the same old hands, hoping this time they will discover the “treasure” their eyes had missed previously.…

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SSGC’s chairperson inaugurates new assembly line for manufacturing residential gas meters

SSGC’s Chairperson Dr Shamshad Akhtar has inaugurated a new assembly line for measuring units of G-4 Gallus residential gas meters. The gas utility’s Meter Manufacturing Plant (MMP) is South East Asia’s only one of its kind located inside the head office compound. SSGC’s MMP started its production in 1975 with the prime objective of fulfilling domestic gas meters’ requirements of both the Sui companies. The plant is a source of direct and/or indirect income for around 10,000 Pakistanis. Besides, MMP is a progressive source of saving valuable foreign exchange. Currently,…

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