Ignoring public opinion, Petrobangla bent on hiking gas price: CAB

Consumers Association of Bangladesh (CAB) claimed on Wednesday that although Petrobangla and seven gas companies have failed to justify their proposals for a 117 per cent price hike during public hearings, it is set to increase the price soon.
"During the public hearing, Petrobangla and its companies put up several explanations to justify their proposals. But those explanations appeared unreasonable to the Technical Evaluation Committee (TEC) of BERC. Consequently, the committee proposed for a maximum 20 per cent increase of gas price. However, BERC is now working on it ignoring the public voice just to plunder public money," Prof Shumsul Alam, adviser of the Consumers Association of Bangladesh (CAB) claimed.
Justifying Alam's claims, eminent energy expert Dr Badrul Imam said the current crisis in the gas sector is deeply rooted in the government's failure to conduct exploration. He said it will be totally illogical to raise gas prices for import of only 3 to 5 per cent of gas from the international spot market.
 "In the last 20 years, there has been no major exploration works conducted in the gas sector", he claimed at a virtual press conference.
CAB presented 25 point-demands at the press conference to protect energy rights of the people.Prof Shamsul Alam said Petrobangla currently
imports only five per cent of its daily consumption from a highly volatile international spot market where it has to buy gas at a higher price. And it imports 20 per cent of gas from two international companies under long-term contracts where the price is static.
"If the local production is raised by five per cent, then the country will not need to import the 5 per cent gas from volatile markets at a higher price and finally it would not have to raise the gas price at the retail level," Dr Badrul Imam said.
Normally, the Petrobangla supplies 2,700-3,000, million cubic feet (mmcfd) gas per day of which 2,300 mmcfd is produced locally while 600 to 800 mmcfd is imported as liquefied natural gas LNG.
During the public hearing, CAB challenged the authenticity of the data and statistics provided by Petrobangla's officials. Raised a number of questions on the merit of Petrobangla's proposal and demanded for a cut in its unfair expenses and reducing the system loss instead of increasing the price of gas to adjust its cost.
Citing example from Petrobangla data Dr Alam said there was surplus fund of Tk 7,284.3 and Tk 7,648.8 crore in its LNG import fund for the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 fiscal year, ( as they failed to supply required amount of LNG into the national grid). However, they (Petrobangla) did not adjust the amount and did not calculate the subsidy (for LNG import) in the public hearing, he added.
"Petrobangla's estimated the price of per cubic meter gas as Tk 1.03, Tk 2.78,Tk 31.54 and Tk 83.47 from the SOC, IOC, LNG from contract price and LNG from spot price respectively, whereas the actual price of LNG was Tk 20.50 and Tk 26.17 for contract price and spot price respectively in 2020-2021 fiscal year, but it take the money as per estimation," Dr Alam said.
"If the government will not take massive plan workover and augmentation plan in different gas wells and vivid exploration job in hand then we have to come to the public hearing every year to give support to increase the amount of LNG import as per the plan which outlined 4,000 mmcfd import in the years to come," Dr Badrul Imam said.
He said it is unfortunate that both neighbouring India and Myanmar awarded contracts for offshore gas exploration after the settlement of maritime boundary disputes while Bangladesh miserably failed to do so in the last 10 years.
Referring to the BERC Act, CAB adviser Prof Shamsul Alam said if BERC continues to ignore public voice then CAB will go to the court to bring justice on behalf of the public.