Regulation of Mines and Oilfields and the Mineral Development Act 1948

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Natural Gas Infrastructure and Local Communities in Sindh: A Case of Three Settlements in Sanghar District (2022)

Written by Zeenat Hisam and Ishak Soomro, this 2022 research report was produced by The Knowledge Forum as a part of its programme to promote a narrative on scaling back fossil fuels in Pakistan, with the support of Tara, a regionally-led grant-making initiative to accelerate energy transformation in Asia.

Pakistan is a resource-rich country and the energy sector — driven on the back of fossil-fuel based solutions – has played a major role in fuelling economic growth and development. Extraction of oil and gas requires huge capital, sophisticated technology and highly skilled labour. The first beneficiaries of the extraction are thus the investors, the operating companies and the management (national or global corporations). The larger beneficiaries are the industries and the households, mainly located in urban and industrial areas across the country. Local population living in hydrocarbons-producing regions in Pakistan do not benefit from natural resources lying under their feet and being extracted by outsiders which include provincial and federal governments.

Local economy and local living conditions at many production sites have remained stagnant for decades. The population living in districts with high endowment of natural resources suffer multiple socio-economic deprivations, particularly in the areas of education, health, and employment.

While the dominant narrative in the energy sector, particularly in oil and gas development, is built around probing of technical aspects, scrutiny and analyses of energy production and its benefits, very little documentation in Pakistan captures the experiences of the local communities vis a vis oil and gas industry. Many resource- rich countries make efforts to improve the local economy by leveraging linkages to production projects. The value brought to the local, regional or national economy from an extraction project is referred to as the “local content”. This snapshot study attempts to touch upon the lack of local content in the context of three settlements in the area close to gas fields in Sanghar District Sindh.

View and download the full report here:

Natural Gas Infrastructure and Local Communities in Sindh: A Case of Three Settlements in Sanghar District

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Coal and Sunshine

Published in Dawn on May 10 2018

Fumes seep and spiral / Canaries in the coal mine / Chirp their last faint song. — haiku

HOW long will the demise of coal as an energy source take? When will the world finally pull out its miners from the dark, dingy and dangerous shafts? Not very soon, but not in the distant future either. The era of coal is waning. Developed countries are burning less coal for power generation and going for a mix of cleaner renewable energy and natural gas. China, too, is increasingly using solar energy and producing 60 per cent of the total solar cell manufactured in the world. In 2017, the world installed 98 gigawatts of new solar power projects as the cost of solar has fallen by 70pc since 2010.

Yet the demand for coal and the compulsion to extract it at great social cost is increasing in developing economies like Pakistan because coal is cheaper and exists in one’s own backyard. Social cost, in terms of loss of human lives and the mauling of the ecosystem, means little. Had human life and nature mattered, policymakers would have come up with regulations that respected and safeguarded the lives of workers and the surrounding habitat. Recently in two separate accidents of gas explosion and cave-in, at least 23 coal miners lost their lives in Balochistan’s coalfields.

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