Restructuring and Overhauling Gas Supply Chain Management

Ensuring a sustainable supply of primary fuel (gas, coal, and fuel oil) is a major challenge for Bangladesh’s energy and power sector. Since 2000, successive governments have failed to make a political decision to exploit discovered coal resources buried at mineable depths. The governments have also failed to carry out the required exploration of petroleum resources in onshore frontier areas.

- Saleque Sufi

The huge potential of the vast offshore in the Bay of Bengal remains virtually unexplored. Despite having significant potential, no mentionable headways could be made to exploit renewable energy. Ignoring primary fuel development, the governments ventured to import primary fuel from the global market which often gets volatile for regional and global geopolitics. Consequently, Bangladesh possessing a 28,089MW grid-connected power generation capacity struggles to generate consistently 14,000MW. 1,5002,000MW average deficit causes nationwide power load-shedding. The reasons are attributed to the alarming depletion of discovered gas reserves and fund shortage to import primary fuel from the global market. Higher generation costs than power tariffs have turned the BPDB bankrupt. It owes huge outstanding payments to IPPs for power it purchased, for gas supplied by Petrobangla, and for liquid fuel that BPC supplied. Petrobangla and BPC in turn also have huge outstanding payments to their suppliers. Policies and strategies are responsible for this mess. However, one of the major failures is the lack of competence of Petrobangla and its companies in exploring and exploiting domestic fuel resources. It is not that Petrobangla and its thirteen companies engaged in energy and mineral resources system management do not possess quality manpower. The structure of these entities and the environment is such that human resources cannot make the required contributions. Incompetent bureaucracy dominates and dictates. An evil nexus of political leadership and business syndicate frustrates the honest and sincere endeavors of company executives. Petrobangla company officials suffer from discrimination in salary and benefits compared with power companies under the same ministry. This has led to a massive brain drain from Petrobangla companies. Petrobangla companies are supposed to be administered by the provisions of the Companies Act and a properly constituted board of directors. Howev