Bangladesh Energy: Poor Policy, Wrong Strategy

Bangladesh, now one of the poorest countries of the world is really not poor in respect of natural endowment of resources. It has very fertile land which grows almost everything with minimum of efforts. It has great hard working and painstaking farmers, happy go merry general masses that believe in plain living and are more than happy if they get two square meals. Bangladesh has great garment girls who with bare minimum wages helping to earn huge foreign exchange in Ready made Garments industries. It has very hard working labor force which is earning huge wages in foreign land and remitting these to Bangladesh. Yet the country remains poor because of rotten and corrupt politics, poor governance and inappropriate policy and vision for exploiting substantial primary energy. Bangladesh has high quality Natural Gas and Coal. But for years we have failed to settle on a proper strategy to explore and exploit both. Consequently the country is in the midst of a very serious energy crisis.

The gas sector is more than half a century old yet it does not have a exploration plan, depletion strategy, competent reservoir engineering unit. There is no agreed and authentic reservoir assessment to tell with any degree of confidence the proven, probable and possible reserve of natural gas. Some theoretician based on sketchy and motivated information creates panic off and on and misguide poor attitude and corrupt political leadership. Some opportunist business syndicate avail this confused state and fish in muddy water. This clique systematically destroyed the capacity of Petrobangla and other Petrobangla companies. Bright competent professionals wiling to serve the sector with vision, commitment and innovations were not encouraged, regular recruitment of fresh young guns were stopped. There were favoritism and parochial preference for promotion training and prized posting. Evil syndicates involved in theft and pilferage were patronized and favored. Consequently huge brain drain of competent professionals made the sector hollow. BAPEX was crippled deliberately to make the exploration and drilling segment almost barren, no initiative was taken to grow and nourish mining professionals.

Consequently our managerial capacity to monitor the gas exploration and mining works has become almost nonexistent. Quazi Shahid, a very knowledgeable Petroleum Engineer tried to play some role in proper management of reservoirs till he was alive. But he used to be sadly ignored. He met a tragic road accident and with that whatever resources we had disappeared. Pertobangla in several years could not man this unit properly. If we had an active reservoir engineering group we could have more authentic information of our reserve and resource and could have better managed the reservoirs But in its absence we are groping in the dark with various figures.

Energy Bangla