Enter 2025, it was decided that the fundamentally unsustainable power sector could only be saved by putting to waste years of policies and billions of dollars of gas-related investment and infrastructure. At the behest of the IMF, the government imposed a “grid transition levy” on gas consumption for captive power generation to force industries to the national grid.

An Ordinance was rushed to meet the January 31st structural benchmark deadline, and the calculation methodology passed into law yielded a negative levy—because in fact gas-fired captive generation is more expensive than the grid at RLNG prices.

A Rs. 791/MMBtu levy was then made up purely to show compliance to the IMF, while captive power plants in the fertilizer and other favoured sectors are being supplied with gas through a private monopoly under Third Party Access without any levy.

Outsourced power: how aid agencies engineered Pakistan’s energy bureaucracy?—I

Meanwhile, captive gas consumption on the Sui infrastructure is down by up to 90 percent YoY and the power sector is refusing to honour its RLNG offtake commitments. This has left the country with 400 MMcf/d of surplus RLNG, forcing $12/MMBtu cargoes to be diverted to domestic consumers at just........

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