Hassan Jawwad
KARACHI - CNG Station Owners Association President Malik Khuda Bakhsh, has said shifting from Compressed Natural Gas to Liquid Petroleum Gas would be a long-term process requiring new investments.
He said that government has taken this decision without keeping in mind that LPG is a costly imported fuel and its uninterrupted availability at current prices would be a problematic issue. As against LPG, we can rely more on locally-produced cheaper and environment-friendly CNG fuel,” Malik added.
He fears that thousands of direct and indirect jobs will be at stake in 3,600 CNG stations countrywide from the policy shift to promote LPG. He estimates LPG import to supply to a large number of vehicles will be over $6 billion every year.
Malik said government collects revenue of Rs 240 million per annum while Rs222 billion is saved annually with usage of CNG instead of petrol.
In a suspicious move, the car makers and general public in Pakistan are being forced to now convert their vehicles to costly imported LPG. The plan to fleece billions of rupees from general public is being imposed to buy new LPG kits and cylinders.
Sources in the industry said. “The continuous increase in CNG prices and reduction in LPG rates is also a part of this plan. The plan is to sell out thousands of new LPG kits and cylinders to existing CNG users despite the fact that they had already spent thousands of rupees on CNG kits and cylinders, sources claimed.
Almost all the stakeholders of the energy sector have opposed the move to convert vehicles from CNG to LPG but government is still insisting to initiate plan at any cost.
Moreover, the environmental experts have also raised their voices against LPG saying that commercially available LPG is currently derived from fossil fuels and it releases carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming. Experts said that CNG is lighter than air and thus will normally dissipate in case of a leak, giving it a significant safety advantage over LPG which is twice as heavy as air and dissipate slowly.
Because of this, LPG flow along floors and tend to settle in low spots, such as basements and such accumulations can cause explosion hazards. “This is the reason that LPG fuelled vehicles are prohibited from indoor parkades in many jurisdictions,” they added.
“It is hard to believe that government termed the accidents of cylinder explosions a major reason to ban CNG conversions whereas it involved the vehicles with roadside installations of kit and cylinders without following proper safety procedures whereas it is promoting LPG which is more prone to blasting accidents due to leakage, experts said adding that such incidents have happened in Pakistan when LPG cylinders exploded and the buildings where the cylinders were stored collapsed resulting in dozens of deaths.