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Gas crisis continues to increase due to cold weather across country

Gas crisis continues to increase due to cold weather across country
December 30, 2019
KARACHI (92 News) – The ongoing gas crisis has been increased across the country due to the extreme cold weather on Monday. According to the details garnered, domestic consumers are facing troubles as the women troubles to cook food due to the shortage of gas. The citizens also compelled to use gas cylinder for domestic use. The people are facing extremely low gas pressure, creating difficulties in cooking food and performing other related operations. Several industrial units and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) stations have also been deprived of gas supply. On Sunday, the gas shortfall continued in Punjab even after the closure of gas supply to industry and CNG stations. The gas crisis intensified due to the extremely cold weather condition across the country. In most areas, stoves in the houses also closed due to the gas shortage. Industrial units in Lahore and Faisalabad remained closed as gas crisis has continued to persist in parts of Punjab, Balochistan and Sindh. The crisis has intensified following increase in demand of CNG due to drop in temperature across the country. The domestic sector is also facing extremely low gas pressure, creating difficulties for the people in cooking food and performing other related operations. On the other hand, gas supply has been restored to CNG stations in Sindh till 7pm. Earlier, the ongoing electricity and gas supply shortfall has brought misiries on domestic consumers across Pakistan as the demand of the CNG has increased with a sudden drop in temperature this winter. Electricity and gas shortfall increased in severe cold weather and load shedding of electricity and gas outages are also underway. According to Ministry of Energy sources, the shortfall of electricity has reached 3000MW. The system is facing 2 billion 48 crore cubic feet gas shortage, local gas production is reduced by 59 crore 6 million cubic feet, gas supply to power plants was reduced by two third and the power generation from the Tarbela Dam was only 200MW now. 14 power generating units are shut down in Tarbela Dam; Mangla Dam is also generating 200MW of electricity. Non-availability of gas, the demand of electricity has increased into 14000MW. Meanwhile, the 5 hour load shedding is continued all over the country. Particularly, the supply situation has further worsened in the congested neighbourhoods of the provincial capital of Karachi where the total shortfall surged to about 500 million metric cubic feet a day (MMCFD) with the demand of about 1600 MMCFD a day.