The Pakistani government has given approval to the country's third LNG terminal, after the International Monetary Fund granted July 3 a $6 billion, three-year loan.
However, the start up of the facility is likely to suffer delays beyond its initial 2019-end target, as the government has prioritized shoring up foreign exchange reserves that have been falling over the past 10 months, an official with the petroleum ministry said this week, without providing further details on the project timeline.
The government will issue a tender next month seeking expressions of interest from potential companies to develop the floating LNG terminal -- Pakistan's third -- which will also be located at the port of Karachi.
The facility will increase the country's regasification capacity by 600 Mcf/day. The country's fourth LNG terminal was originally scheduled to commence operations in 2020, but it remains unclear if the plans have changed.
Pakistan, which began LNG imports in 2015, received 6.8 million mt in 2018, according S&P Global Platts Analytics. The government is targeting 14 million LNG imports by 2022 and up to 21 million mt/year by 2025, in a bid to bridge the gap between rising domestic consumption and declining upstream reserves.
UPSTREAM BLOCKS TENDER
Pakistan is also looking to offer 35 new upstream blocks through a tender that will run from 2019-end to 2020-end, Nadeem Babar, special assistant to the Prime Minister, said.
"The government is conducting surveys and studies pertaining to these new blocks so that the intending companies can decide which blocks they want to bid for," Babar said.
"We are in talks with several international exploration companies and signed agreements with some of them, including Kuwait Petroleum," Babar said Thursday.
Natural gas currently accounts for around a third of Pakistan's primary energy consumption. It also accounts for a third of electricity generation, with the remaining two-thirds split evenly between oil and hydropower.
