Its either power or gas for load shedding-hit consumers

With long hours of power load shedding across the country becoming a norm, the citizens are forced to run in-house power generators but with petrol and diesel already out of their range, many of them are converting the machines to run on much cheaper fuel, natural gas. However, another crisis is in the making as the increased usage of gas-fired generators is bound to result in gas load shedding, even during the summers.
The consumption of gas has drastically increased across the country as people turn to cheaper alternate sources of power in houses and offices and unplanned frequent outages of power, spanning over 12 hours in a day, have miserably disturbed their routine life.
Though the people running gas generators can take a sigh of relief as at least they can sleep during nights, the increasing consumption of gas has also created a huge demand for the natural fuel, mostly in big cities like Karachi.
Experts claim that the fast increasing consumption of gas through not only running gas-fired generators but also fuelling a huge number of vehicles on compressed natural gas (CNG) is likely to create a gas crisis in the country.
According to them, over 50 percent of the household power generators are now being made to run on natural and the sale of gas-fired generators has also increased across the country.
The use of generators has also increased as the uninterrupted power supply (UPS) units are fast becoming obsolete due to the hours-long power breakdowns; besides generators are more durable compared to UPS for domestic purposes.
Well-placed sources in the Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) confirm that the increasing number of gas generators and fuel-shifting of vehicles have drastically increased the gas demand across the country.
Without explaining how and what volume of gas was being consumed on daily basis, they confirmed that the rate of consumption was increasing day by day, thus widening the demand and supply gap.
The demand hike is, however, clear with the SSGC now supplying only 150 to 180mmcfd to the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) as compared to the last year, when it was supplying around 280mmcfd during the summer season.
According to a report, during the period of fiscal year (FY) 2005 to 2010, Pakistan’s natural gas consumption increased from 1,159 billion cubic feet to 1,289 billion cubic feet, an increase of 130 billion cubic feet in five years. During the period, the transport (CNG) sector witnessed the highest increase of 305 percent in consumption, followed by industry (44 percent), commercial (36 percent), domestic (28 percent) and fertiliser (16 percent).
On the other hand, the natural gas available for the power sector declined by a hefty 27 percent – from 504 billion cubic feet to 367 billion cubic feet during the period, a decrease of 137 billion cubic feet. Because of the drastic reduction in gas availability for the power sector, 15.5 billion units lesser electricity was generated from natural gas in the FY2009-10 as compared to the FY2004-05. Consequently, the share of natural gas in power generation declined from 51 percent to 29 percent. As power generation from natural gas is about eight rupees cheaper per unit than from furnace oil, a decrease of 15.5 billion units from natural gas translates into annual incremental cost of Rs 123 billion.
Besides the high demand of gas, domestic generators’ prices have also gone up by around 20 percent as compared to the previous year due to increase in demand during the hot season. The price for a small Chinese or local-made power generator currently ranges between Rs 7,000 to Rs 50,000 in the markets of Karachi.