Staff Correspondent,New Age
The government has asked the Electricity Generation Company of Bangladesh to convert the under-construction gas-based 2X120MW Siddhirganj plant into a dual-fuel plant as Petrobangla said it would not be able to supply gas to run the power plant. With the government giving the latest directive last week, the EGCB, a subsidiary of the Power Development Board, has found itself in deep trouble as it would take months to convert the power plant into a dual-fuel plant and the cost of electricity generation will increase eight times if fuel like diesel is used, said officials. Petrobangla officials at a meeting at the Power Division on Tuesday said that with the existing daily gas extraction, Petrobangla would not be able to supply gas to the ‘peaking power plant’, which is being installed at a cost of Tk 1133 crore, and expected to go into test run in June. They said that they could supply gas to the Siddhirganj plant if gas supply to other power plants was curtailed. The ‘peaking plant’ is supposed to operate during peak hours. Petrobangla currently supplies around 780 million cubic feet of gas to power plants against a demand for around 900mmcfd. Another 210MW plant at Siddhirganj now faces gas shortage regularly. Although Petrobangla earlier committed that it would supply gas to the Siddhirganj plant, which would need around 30-40mmcfd of gas, installation of some unplanned rental power plants by the interim government has pushed the demand for gas up. The meeting, chaired by the prime minister’s adviser Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, then asked EGCB to convert the under-construction power plant into a dual-fuel power plant. Officials of PDB and EGCB, however, told New Age that installation of the power plant would be further delayed if it was converted into a dual-fuel plant as the Indian contractor had failed to install the plant six months after deadline. The Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited in January 2007 won the $113 million turnkey contract from the EGCB to install the two-unit plant and it was supposed to go for commercial operation on November 7, 2008. ‘The company, however, failed to install the power plant in time. It is now supposed to complete installation of one of the units in June and go for test run. But the plant is unlikely to start operation in June because of gas shortage and the contractor will have no excuse for any further delay,’ said a PDB official. Officials of EGCB said that they had started talks with BHEL for converting the Siddhirganj plant into a dual-fuel plant, especially to keep an option to run the plant with diesel along with gas. ‘But we do not know how much time it will take to convert it into a dual-fuel plant. Besides, it may not be economically viable to run the power plant with diesel,’ said a high official. He said that they had estimated that an additional fund of around Tk 200 crore would be required to convert the plant and install the facilities to store diesel. ‘Apart from technological changes in the power plant, we will have to arrange facilities to bring about 1,000 tonnes of diesel to run the power plant for 16 hours a day and huge storage facilities will be needed for diesel,’ he said. The country’s overall demand for diesel is around 8,000 tonnes a day. ‘The main problem, however, will be the generation cost of electricity. The initial estimate was that the production cost of electricity would be Tk 2.01 for per kilowatt hour or one unit if gas was used as fuel. But we have estimated that the production cost will be around Tk 16-20 per unit if diesel is used. The government will have to give hundreds of crores of taka as subsidies to consumers if it wants to purchase electricity from us,’ he said. Apart from some small power plants, no large plants in the country is run by diesel which is priced at Tk 44 per litre while around 200MW of electricity is being generated by furnace oil, which is priced at Tk 26 per litre. The EGCB official said that they would request the government to supply gas to the power plant at least 3-4 hours a day. ‘We will place a position paper on the cost and benefit of converting it into a dual-fuel plant,’ he said. The government has recently taken a move that all the proposed power plants will have dual-fuel option as the country is facing a gas shortage of around 400mmcfd.
Filed under: Bangladesh
