Karachi project: LNG terminal poses health hazard

ISLAMABAD: Alarm bells are ringing in Islamabad over a $160 million dollar project to develop a floating Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal adjacent to Karachi.

As the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (Ogra) starts public hearing on the project from Tuesday, certain officials feel that safety measures for such a project would need to be extra tight. The hearing seeks to give formal approval to Pakistan Gasport Limited (PGL) to set up the LNG terminal.

This multi-million-dollar deal was approved in 2007. Ogra granted a provisional licence to PGL on May 14, 2009, to complete the formalities for importing LNG. The Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) also immediately gave its ex-post facto approval to the implementation agreement.

After three years, the project is being launched and Ogra has announced that it will conduct a public hearing today. However, Ogra has advertised the announcement about the hearing in only one English newspaper.  An official said that this could be an attempt to avoid public debate on this sensitive project as the paper in which the advertisement appeared was not widely read in Karachi. He said that many people in Karachi would be unaware that their fate was being decided in Islamabad at a public hearing.