Pak tells China to shelve coal power plant
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has decided to shelve a major power project pushed by previous government under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and will axe hundreds of other schemes under the Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) later this month.
A report in Daily Dawn newspaper on Monday based on background discussions with government officials suggest that Islamabad has officially conveyed to Beijing that it is no more interested in the 1,320MW Rahim Yar Khan power project in view of sufficient generation capacity already lined up for the next few years. It has requested the Chinese to formally delete the project from the CPEC list.
During the 8th Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) meeting held last month, a Pakistani delegation led by minister for planning and development Makhdoom Khusro Bakhtyar “proposed to remove the Rahim Yar Khan imported fuel power plant from the CPEC list.
This was done in order to provide “structure optimisation space for the subsequent power market of Pakistan,” said an official, quoting minutes of the December 20 JCC meeting.
The Chinese side suggested that a joint study on optimisation of energy mix be carried out at the earliest. The project was originally pushed as imported coal-based plant by Quaid-iAzam Thermal Company of the Punjab government led by former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif, who used to attend meetings of the cabinet committee on energy led by then prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
The CPEC, which connects Gwadar Port in Balochistan with China’s Xinjiang province, is the flagship project of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.
An unnamed official told the paper that the Imran Khan government had already made up its mind to remove almost 400 “politically motivated” projects from the development portfolio as part of a comprehensive midyear review of the PSDP later this month. The official said the last government, for instance, had included hundreds of gas schemes in the PSDP and allocated funds even though there was no additional gas available for new connections.
Many of these schemes could not take off. He said the mid-term review of the PSDP would be held in the last week of January and about Rs 2 trillion worth of development projects would be revised. He said that most of the unapproved projects and unfunded schemes would be excluded from the PSDP. The federal government’s overall development portfolio stood at about Rs 6 trillion and with the current pace, allocation of funds would take 9-10 years to complete even if no fresh development project was taken up, an official said. The PSDP size would remain unchanged, but throw-forward would be significantly reduced through revision in the number of projects.