The Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) has announced a reduction in supply of gas from its Naimat basal field.

The reduction has increased the misery of Karachi residents who are already facing sporadic outages and low gas pressure since winter started.

SSGC said supply in their system has observed a reduction. “There is a technical fault at the Naimat Basal Gas Field,” the company said in a statement.

Karachi will witness a shortfall of 100 million cubic feet per day (mmcfd) because of the fault.

SSGC said in its statement that low pressure has made it immensely difficult to meet the high demand of the industrial and domestic sectors.

The statement said SSGC’s line pack has been affected due to low pressure in Karachi, adding that the far-flung areas of the city or those at the end of the company’s network will face the most problem in gas supply.

The statement said, “Efforts are being made to meet the demand of the commercial and domestic users, according to the government’s gas load management policy,” adding that “We are trying our best to meet the demand of the commercial and domestic sectors through our gas load management policy.”

The gas demand of the country at present is more than 6 billion cubic feet per day. While 4.156 bcfd, including 3.2 bfcd local gas, is available in the system.

The country has capacity to import 1.2 bcfd but 956 mmcfd imported RLNG is available. The second PGPL LNG terminal is currently underutilised as it is just re-gasifying 350 mmcfd LNG.