The government must heed the call made by the parliamentary standing committee on energy to put a stop to corruption and mismanagement in the country’s energy sector.
It is long overdue for action to be taken against illegal gas connections.
Titas Gas officials estimate that there are over 250km of illegal gas pipelines and 200,000 illegal connections around Dhaka and Gazipur alone.
Such illegal connections are believed to use over 200 million cubic feet of gas each day, causing the government to daily lose several hundred crore taka.
Aside from causing corruption and revenue losses, not to mention the risk to public safety posed by irregular connections, their persistence causes huge harm to the country’s industrial sector.
Over 2,300 applications by business users have been pending since July 2009 for new gas connections and load expansions.
The government needs to take firm steps against illegal connections to ensure that new supplies can be provided to these industrial customers. The free for all manner in which illegal connections have been allowed to proliferate and steal precious resources is hugely damaging.
Priority must be given to guaranteeing supplies to industry and new entrepreneurs.
To maximise the benefits, the government should also ensure new gas connections are used to run power plants for on-site industrial units. New gas connections should not be given to companies simply to operate boilers, which can be readily fueled with furnace oil or diesel.
Captive power plants are the best use for an industrial gas connection as they not only provide power where it is needed, but help lessen demand on the electricity grid, and thereby reduce load shedding, which benefits everyone.
It is vital for the economy that illegal gas connections are stopped to help guarantee supplies to industrial consumers and prevent industrial growth stagnating.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
My suggestion to Petrobangla / Energy Ministry that government must stop giving connection to gas engine installed in textile/ other mills instead setting up a gas based power plant to produce twice the power with the same quantity of gas and distribute the power to industry and earn very good amount of revenue.
Alternatively , if the process steam industry set up a medium pressure
boiler with 100 deg Super heated steam and installed a back pressure steam turbine which can produce 70-80% of factory power demand and
deliver steam for their process which is called as co generation system.
In this process boiler need extra 10 % excess fuel to generate power plus steam
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