Pakistan has a rich treasure of coal reserves which can produce 100,000 MW of energy for 500 years, according to Punjab Higher Education Commission Chairperson Dr Shahid Munir.

He was talking at the concluding session of the three-day vice chancellors conference on “Paradigm Shift in Higher Education—Hackathon for Future Planning.” The hackathon was organized jointly by Kohsar University Murree and the University of Education Lahore under the supervision of the Punjab Higher Education Commission.

He said that it is very important for Pakistan to develop its indigenous base for energy needs. “Pakistan cannot rely on outsourcing of energy forever. We will have to find our base to meet our energy needs,” he said. “Oil and gas imports are very costly. We do not have enough capacity to keep buying from abroad. Our energy needs are growing with the increase in our population. It is, therefore, essential for us to develop our local industry for energy. Coal energy can be a very good starting point since we have so much of it,” he said.

Dr Shahid Munir who is an internationally acclaimed expert on energy economics, in his lecture on “Meeting Energy Crisis: Challenges in 21st Century” said that Pakistan’s total fuel import bill stands at USD 21.43 bn. “This eats up 66% of our total foreign exchange,” he said. “If we fully develop our ability to make our own energy by utilizing our indigenous reserves to their maximum capacity, energy crisis can be solved. Also, we will be able to save billions in foreign exchange.”

“The most pressing challenge that we face today is to provide cheap energy to billions of consumers. However, energy production has hurt the climate and we cannot continue with traditional methods of energy production. We need to switch to renewables and cleaner sources of energy. Pakistan spends 61% of its oil and gas import on energy production. This is a very inefficient use of limited resources. Annually we can retrieve 233 million barrels of our local oil but we only recover 44 million. This shows that we are not working at our full capacity,” he added.

According to his findings, electricity demand in Pakistan will reach up to 49078 MW in 2030. Natural gas needs will increase to 08% of our total energy needs. Its production, however, will decline since a lot of our reserves have already been consumed to their full extent. The fall in production of natural gas will be lower than 01 % bcfd (billion cubic feet per day) by 2025.

“Lack of energy is the primary cause of loadshedding and industry shutdowns. Therefore, we are not able to meet our exports targets and thus stay poor. It is important that we give due attention to the energy sector. A lot of optimal solutions are available. We just need to act as a society to solve our most pressing problems,” he said.

“If we can switch to renewable forms of energy at the same time that we develop our coal capacity, all the better. This transition is inevitable. Sooner than later we will have to find alternative ways of energy production. We should promote the use of solar water pumps, tube wells, heaters, geysers, cookers, desalination plants, etc,” he continued.

“We can invest in nuclear energy too which is the ultimate solution to our energy problems. It requires high investments, high maintenance costs and low fuel expenses. 43,000-MW of power can also be generated through available wind energy potentials. Pakistan is the 5th largest sugarcane producer in the world and we can also produce power from the waste of sugarcane and cotton stalk,” he said.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk