Bangladesh gas crisis highlights logistics weakness, concentration risk: Report
New Delhi, Aug 29
Bangladesh's gas crisis amounts to a logistics failure and a huge supply shortfall, with total availability around 2,420 million cubic feet per day in mid‑August against national demand of about 3,800 MMcfd, a new report has said.
The report from Bangladesh-based The Daily Star said the shortfall has hit factories, filling stations, households and power plants.
The supply disruption is due to the failure in the country's LNG import chain rather than a single procurement problem, especially as the Excelerate Energy's FSRU went offline following a fire and technical problems.
Further weather‑related unloading delays at a terminal left inventories exhausted and supplies interrupted.
"Excelerate's terminal later also exhausted its LNG inventory while waiting for its next cargo. These were separate incidents, but together they exposed the same weakness: the country's LNG supply chain does not have enough redundancy," the publication said.
Gas imported as liquefied natural gas (LNG) has to pass through a long physical chain consisting of procurement, cargo nomination, LNG shipping, vessel scheduling and navigation through the international sea routes.
Subsequently, it must arrive at Moheshkhali island, get transferred to a floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU), stored, regasified, transmitted through high-pressure pipelines, and finally distributed to power plants, industries, refuelling stations and households.
Even if one important link fails in this supply chain, the consequences can travel through the entire economy, the report noted.
Bangladesh imports LNG through its two Floating Storage and Regasification Units (FSRUs) established off Moheshkhali Island, which now supply an estimated 30-37 per cent of national gas needs.
The report argued that concentration creates a single‑point vulnerability, where a technical failure, marine accidents or shipping delays at Moheshkhali can quickly cascade down the supply chain.
"A port operator would hesitate to route a critical share of national trade through only two pieces of infrastructure located at essentially the same gateway," the report noted.
It also flagged that domestic production continues to decline, and replacement with imported LNG exposes the economy to international prices, foreign exchange requirements, and maritime disruption.
— IANS
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