Establish a gas market for boosting exports
A functioning gas market would reward exploration at home and buy LNG abroad when its full delivered cost is competitive. Pakistan currently does neither. Pakistan’s gas debate is usually presented as a choice between indigenous gas and imported LNG. That framing hides the real problem: Pakistan does not yet have a market capable of telling either source where it is economical, where it is…
Pakistan's gas market is currently a failure, with exploration and LNG import policies dependent on the same missing institution. The country should transition from administratively assigned gas to a market-driven system where the cheapest and most reliable molecule wins. This would require eliminating subsidies, bottlenecks, and payment delays that currently hamper the market's efficiency.
Without such a market, new discoveries risk becoming administratively allocated and imported LNG risks becoming a liability on the public balance sheet.
Brief written by urgent.news from Business Recorder's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
