The national railway has been strained after an entire bogey of freight train transporting coal, from Port Qasim to a new power plant in Sahiwal was found empty, reported a national daily. According to a local news channel, officials confirmed the missing transported coal as a case of theft. It was the second coal consignment for the 1,320-megawatt Sahiwal coal-fired power plant- the first ever project of its kind.
The incident has happened just two days after the first freight train carrying a consignment of 12000 tonnes of coal from Karachi for the coal-fired power was welcomed by the Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. The operations of the power plant were being carried on a trial basis after which the plant will be connected to the national grid.
Officials working on the power plant have voiced concerns over the missing coal, which was imported from South Africa. A committee has been constituted by the Pakistan Railways (PR) to investigate the matter. The officials at the power plant have raised their concerns over railways being the safest mode of coal transportation. “The price of this imported bituminous coal is almost double than the locally produced coal and the theft can’t be ignored,” an official said.
The PR spokesman has dismissed the idea of theft saying that there were reports of coal leakage during the transportation. He also added that the carriages have been designed by China and produced in Pakistan. There have both auto and manual features. It may have intentionally or unintentionally been put on a manual mode thus causing leakage. However, an official at the power station has refuted these claims saying if there was a leakage, how had it gone unnoticed? He argued that such cases could open up room for theft. The PR spokesman confirmed that PR will be designing locking devices to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.
The $1.8 billion Sahiwal power plant has two units of 660MW each and would be first power plant to run on imported coal. An estimated 4.48 million tonnes of coal is required annually for the plant, based on a calculation of 22 hours of power generation per day.
