Engineering Post Report
Domestic natural gas production target was fixed at 1.47 million cubic feet for the financial year 2021-22. The gap in the indigenous gas production was planned to be supplemented through import of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).
For the financial year 2020-21, target for domestic natural gas production was fixed at 1.43 trillion cubic feet against the achievement by end June 2021 was 1.27 trillion cubic feet i.e. 89 per cent. It has been more than once been stated officially at the appropriate highest level that natural gas domestic production is decreasing on average by 9 per cent annually and no new gas reserves discovery has been made for quite some time.
According to some facts and figures available regarding performance of the two national gas entities, the Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) and Sui Southern Gas Company Limited (SSGCL) have collectively repaired around 887 kilometer faulty pipelines and rectified large number of 1446342 leakages in line with the strategy of the federal government for bringing down the Unaccounted For Gas (UFG) ratio.
Furthermore, experts of both the national gas entities are reported to have inspected around as many as 13388 Town Border Stations and rectified 633 of these stations after finding them leaking, according to an official document.
SNGPL and SSGCL both have installed Electronic Volume Corrector (EVC) meters at all industrial connections and high pressure commercial connections for calculating actual volume of gas consumption, maintaining record of hourly/daily gas consumption and generating tamper alarm in case of an attempt being made for magnetic interference with meter or other infrastructure.
Around 1850 out of 3655 industrial connections have so far also been integrated with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) for remote monitoring of industrial consumers for ensuring timely identification of gas theft and measurement error, if any.
In order to effectively check and control the line losses and lowering UFG ration, the cyber locks are being installed at the industrial meter stations in order to restrict the access of the industrial consumers to the meters and regulators for reducing the chances of gas theft. Both SNGPL and SSGCL are also using Laser Leak Detectors, the best available technique and gadgets, for identification of underground leakages.
The UFG losses of both the gas entities i.e. SNGPL and SSGCL stood at 8.83 per cent and 15.85 per cent respectively during the financial year 2020-21. According to the information contained in the official document, volumetric loss of SNGPL had remained 34021 million cubic feet (MMCF) of gas and of SSGCL at comparatively higher level of 67476 MMCF of gas mainly because of gas leakages, measurement errors as well as theft.
During the financial year 2019-20, the SNGPL and SSGCL had prevented a volumetric loss of around 9938 MMCF against the UFG reduction target of 14806 MMCF gas. The UFG is a phenomenon of gas loss that occurs due to various technical factors when gas flows from the fields to the end consumers across the country. It is , as such, calculated as the difference between the metered gas volume injected into the transmission and distribution network i.e. Point of Dispatch/Delivery and the metered gas delivered to the end consumers i.e. Consumer Meter during a financial year.
During the financial year 2020-21, SNGPL was to add 405450 gas consumers including domestic, commer4ciak and industrial consumers. Against this, the achievement on the whole was 262206 giving a performance ration of only 64.67 per cent. Quite interestingly, against target of provision of gas connections to 450 industrial consumers, SNGPL could only provide gas connections to 52 new industrial consumers which worked out to be just 11.55 per cent of the target.
SSGCL was to add 125245 all categories of new consumers during the period report against which gas connections could only be provided to 70687 new domestic , commercial and industrial consumers giving over all percentage of 56.43. SSGCL also failed to even provide gas connections to 167 new industrial consumer, as per the target , during the financial year as only 65 new industrial connections were added giving a percentage of 56.43, comparatively much better than SNGPL.
SNGPL target of all categories of new consumers during financial year2021-22 was 1200000 and that of SSGCL 133938 .
In terms of transmission and distribution, both the national gas entities failed to achieve even 50 per cent of the target. SNGPL was to extend transmission and distribution network by 6291 kilometers against which the achievement was only 2947 kms i.e. 46.84 per cent. Likewise, SSGCL was to extend its transmission and distribution up to 1206 kms against which the achievement was 49.17 per cent. During ongoing financial year 2021-22, SNGPL ‘s target for expanding its transmission and distribution system is 17060 kms and that of SSGCL it is only 1671 kms.
