LAHORE: Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court on Tuesday issued notice to the federal government on a petition seeking funds for a project to use coal reserves in Thar for electricity generation. Advocate Chaudhry Maqsood Gujjar filed the petition saying Pakistan was facing an energy crisis that had damaged local industries and the economy. He said that the Thar coal project could help overcome the severe energy shortage in the country, but the government was not providing funds for it. He asked the court to direct the government to allocate Rs5 billion for the project in the next budget.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 23rd, 2012.
175 billion tonnes of coal reserves appears to be no more than a myth. Published data by Government of Sindh’s website indicates 175 billion tonne coal ‘resource potential” and not ‘recoverable reserves”. If we compare data of coal resource potential then China has coal resource potential of 5.1 trillion tonnes and just one site in Alaska has 4.3 trillion tonnes, Australia over 1 trillion tonnes. The ‘recoverable reserve’ figure from published Government of sindh is between 2 and 4 billion tonnes, which makes this location 134th largest in the world. The lignite is a much inferior quality and so less energy density and larger quantity of contaminants.
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