When the first Thar Plant went live in 2019, it was supposed to reduce Pakistan’s reliance on imported gas. What does it mean if Thar’s Lignite can be gassified?
On a hot April afternoon in 2019, Pakistan fired up its first ever power plant fueled by domestic coal. The shiny new plant, run by the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company, was the sort of project bureaucrats, politicians, and development sector flunkies dream about and doodle the name of in their secret diaries.
For starters, it was the first to exploit the 175 billion tonnes of lignite that was spread across the 900 km2 coal fields in Tharparkar, which is possibly the second largest coal reserve in the world.
Check.
The project was being run through a public-private partnership between the Sindh Government and Engro Corporation, which is by far one of the most responsible organisations in corporate Pakistan.
Double check.
And the real kicker? Engro’s Thar Project came under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor with $50 billion of proposed investment in infrastructure projects. At the time this was one of the most talked about projects in terms of how China’s Belt and Road Initiative was impacting the global energy landscape.
Triple check.
But the timing, dear reader, was awfully ironic.
The Thar Coal fields had first been discovered in 1991 through a joint mission (we used that term very liberally) of the Pakistan Geological Survey and the United States Agency for International Development. With an estimated 175 billion tonnes of lignite, the Thar Coal Fields have the capacity to produce 100,000 MW of electricity for the next 200 years.
To put that into perspective, as of now the largest coal reserves in the world exist in the USA with just under 250 billion tonnes of recoverable coal.