LAHORE: Pakistan LNG imports rose 30 percent year-on-year, touching 568,000 tons in May 2018 compared to May 2017.
In May, the country received a total of nine cargoes with two delivered to Pakistan GasPort (PGP) and nine cargoes to Engro Elengy (EE) terminal respectively.
Also, Pakistan’s LNG imports soared by nearly 80 percent on a year-on-year basis (YoY) in April 2018, the second-highest amount for a single month ever recorded.
Back then a total of nine cargoes were delivered in April, with imports crossing 560,000 tons.
The conclusion of the commissioning of the Haveli Bahadur Shah power plant in May and on Monday Balloki power plant successfully passed its combined-cycle test run.
A spokesman of National Power Parks Management Company (NPPMC) shared the Balloki power plant based in Kasur and runs on regasified liquefied natural gas (RLNG) has completed its combined reliability run test (RRT).
He added the test run is critical before the commissioning of any power plant and the Balloki power plant had successfully passed its simple cycle reliability run test on 16th August last year.
It reached its simple cycle commercial operation date (COD) on 30th August 2017 for providing 760MW of electricity into the national grid.
From end of August last year, Balloki has contributed over Rs18 billion of electricity to the national grid and groundbreaking of this project occurred on 10th November 2015.
In total, both these plants have fed 3.7 billion units of electricity into the national grid and since the commencement of Ramazan, NPCC has successfully generated 880 million units of electricity which is sufficient to power over six million households-translating to around 18 percent of overall households in Pakistan.
Also, late last month General Electric, Quaid-e-Azam Thermal Power (Private) Limited and Harbin Electric International Company (HEIC) proclaimed the completion of combined cycle commissioning activities and commencement of full-fledged commercial operations at Bhikki power plant.
Bhikki power plant also runs on RLNG and has a capacity of 1,180MW, which translates to feeding up to 2.4 million homes across Pakistan.
Last December, S&P Global Platts in its survey of several companies revealed Pakistan’s rising LNG imports would contribute to fuel demand halving by 2020, the study predicted.
As per the report, fuel oil demand was expected to fall from 9.6 million mt in financial year 2016-17 to roughly 4.5 million or less by FY 2019-20.
Pakistan’s LNG demand is estimated to increase over next five years, with “Pakistan LNG estimating unconstrained demand at 30 million mt/year, or 4 Bcf/day of gas equivalent, by 2022, which is half of the country’s total gas demand projection of 8 Bcf/d for that year, according to government estimates,” read the S&P Global Platts report.
