Despite Summit's LNG terminal resuming, gas supply still lags as Bibiyana goes on maintenance

Despite the resumption of the Summit Group's Floating Storage and Regasification Unit, one of the country's two LNG terminals, overall gas supply failed to improve.

Rather, it witnessed a further fall due to the start of the Bibiyana Gas field's maintenance programme.

However, officials said the Bibiyana Gas field, one of the country's largest gas supply sources, went into routine maintenance on 13 April and will come back to full production within three days on 16 April.

Officials from both state-owned Petrobangla and Chevron, the operator of the Bibiyana Gas field, noted that they are hopeful of getting full-scale supply from Tuesday.   

Petrobangla's official data shows that the production from BIbiyana gas field came down to 453 million cubic feet per day (MMCFD) on Monday from its regular production of 1200 MMCFD.   

Official sources said, the Summit Group finally became successful in commissioning its LNG terminal and resumed re-gasification of imported LNG on 12 April.

The official data of state-owned Petrobangla shows that the supply of imported gas has increased by 162 million cubic feet (MMCFD) to 792 MMCFD from 630 MMCFD following the commissioning of the Summit Group's LNG terminal.

"The gas supply has further increased to 936.30 MMCFD on 14 April," a senior official of the Petrobangla told UNB.

The country has two LNG terminals, set up by the private sector, in Maheshkhali having total regasification capacity of 1100 MMCFD. One is owned and operated by US-based Excelerate Energy having 600 MMCFD capacity while another one is owned and operated by Summit Group having 500 MMCFD.

The gas supply situation witnessed a fall when the Summit Group's LNG Terminal went into a routine maintenance programme in the first week of March. It was scheduled to return to service and resume production on 3 March.

"But initially it failed to come back to production as per schedule and finally it resumed production a few days later," the Petrobangla official said.

Official data shows that the country's gas supply was 2,345 MMCFD on Sunday and Monday against low demand of 3,632 MMCFD at the tail end of the Eid vacation.    

Meanwhile, the official data shows that despite a low demand in the power supply, the country had to experience load shedding of over 300 MW on Monday during the day's peak period.

The PGCB Data shows the country's load shedding was recorded to 305 MW at 10am when the demand was 11,400 MW.

The evening peak demand was forecast to be 14,000 MW on Monday and the officials apprehend more loadshedding tonight.