Bangladesh, which has delayed exploration awards to ConocoPhillips and Tullow Oil Plc after disputes with neighbors, may deploy a floating liquefied natural gas unit this year to plug a shortage of gas, an official said.

Bangladesh is in talks with service companies for a floating LNG import
facility and with LNG suppliers including Qatar to import the fuel,
Shahidul Abedin, director of Bangladesh Oil, Gas & Mineral Corp.,
said in Singapore today.

“We will initially use a floating regassification unit to speed up
imports and then build an onshore terminal near Chittagong,” Abedin said
in an interview at the LNG Supplies for Asian Markets conference in
Singapore. “We need LNG to augment our production.”

South Asian countries including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which
once had a surplus of gas, are now resorting to imports of the
cleaner-burning fuel in frozen form to meet a growing shortage.
Consumption of gas in South Asia is rising more than 7 percent annually
as governments build new power plants to provide electricity to
industries and households.

Bangladesh plans to import between 3 million metric tons and 4 million
tons of LNG a year, Abedin said. That would be adequate to meet the
nation’s current shortage of about 500 million cubic feet of gas a day.
Demand is currently at 2.5 billion cubic feet a day, Abedin said. Gas
consumption is growing as much as 8 percent a year while output is
constrained by delays in awards of new deepwater areas, he said.

Bangladesh Oil, or Petrobangla, plans to increase its 2 billion cubic
feet a day of existing output by as much as 300 million cubic feet a day
in three years as it tries to resolve the territorial disputes in
offshore waters with India and Myanmar, Abedin said.

Area Disputes

The government is unable to issue exploration licenses in deepwater
areas to Conoco and Tullow because Myanmar and India are laying claim to
the areas, Abedin said.

Bangladesh is seeking to attract about $4 billion of investments in
power plants and the LNG terminal, Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, 64, energy
adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, said in November.

The nation of 162 million people plans to set up a fund that will invest
as much as $10 billion in energy and power projects within the next
decade.

LNG is gas that is cooled to a liquid for transport by ship to markets
not connected by pipelines. The fuel is received at import terminals and
converted back to a gaseous form so it can be piped to users.

Source: Bloomberg

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