ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Monday a coal-fired power project in the Thar desert could help the government save up to $6 billion in energy imports, even as the South Asian nation reels from the aftermath of catastrophic floods that analysts have said are partly driven by a failure of political will to cut fossil fuel use.
Experts and scientists say rising fossil fuel use is pushing stronger floods, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in almost every part of the world. Meanwhile, international finance to help at-risk countries such as Pakistan boost their resilience to climate threats and adopt clean energy have largely failed to emerge.
The estimated 175 billion tons of watery, low energy coal in Thar was first discovered in 1992 but because of its poor quality, most companies found it too costly to mine. In 2012, the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), a joint venture between the Sindh government and Engro Powergen, took up the challenge, convincing eight companies to join them. The project is now under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor of infrastructure and energy projects for which Beijing has pledged over $60 in Pakistan. since 2016.
“Amid the skyrocketing fuel prices, the cheaper energy production from the Thar Coal Mines project would prove as a game-changer of development for the entire country,” Sharif was quoted by state media, APP, as saying at a ceremony in Thar in the southern Sindh province.
“The Thar Coal Project, he said, could help the government save up to $6 billion as the expenditure on the import of energy including petrol and liquid petroleum touched $24 billion.”
“Thar Coal project was high on the agenda for the government in view of the reduced cost of power generation,” he added
The PM said not utilizing the country’s indigenous coal reserves was a “huge mistake” and announced a meeting of stakeholders on Thar Coal next week, adding that the federal government would collaborate with the Sindh government to chalk out a policy framework on the mines project, with an objective to connect it with other coal-powered power plants in the country.
Sharif said the international cost of coal had come down from $67 to $44 and could go down further to $30.
“The coal-powered plants, he said, would prove a feasible operation for electricity production at the rate of Rs10 per unit,” APP quoted the PM saying.
This month, a third power plant with the capacity of 330 megawatts was launched as part of the Thar coal project, taking the mine’s total installed power production capacity to 990 megawatts in three years. The previous two plants have a cumulative capacity of 660MW on local coal.
Pakistan has 175 billion tons of coal reserves in Thar equivalent to 50 billion tons of oil equivalent (TOE), which is more than Saudi and Iranian oil reserves. The reserves equal 2,000 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas, which is 68 times higher than Pakistan’s total gas reserves.
In 2020, the government of then PM Imran Khan set in motion a national renewables policy to boost the share of its electric power that comes from renewables to 30 percent by 2030, up from about 4 percent that year.
“The targets in the newly announced policy are a 20 percent share of renewables in installed capacity of Pakistan’s power mix by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030,” Syed Aqeel Hussain Jafry, a policy director for the government’s Alternative Energy Development Board, had said after the new policy was announced.
That would include mainly wind and solar power, but also geothermal, tidal, wave and biomass energy.
With boosts in hydropower capacity expected as well, the shift could bring the share of clean energy in Pakistan’s electricity mix to 65 percent by 2030, an energy reforms task force had predicted in 2020.
