Daily Times

One fine morning, many Pakistanis took to talking about offshore drilling in the Arabian Sea and the possibility of a discovering a huge reservoir of oil and gas that would make the country an exporter of POL products. In March, Prime Minister Imran Khan too talked about offshore drilling activity, off Karachi, being carried out by a consortium led by the ENI, an Italian oil and gas exploration and production giant, with ExxonMobil of the United States, Pakistan Petroleum Limited and the Oil and Gas Development Company Limited. The four-month activity has now ended. Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Petroleum Nadeem Babar has announced that no oil or gas was found. The well is going to be plugged.

The government may have to bear only a fraction of the financial loss in the $100 million activity, as its two companies were only minor partners in the consortium. However, the political loss is huge. Offshore, as well as inland drilling for oil wells is a routine activity. It goes on in many parts of the country without much fanfare. Given the dodgy geological data, the success rate is low. We are now hearing that this was the 17th offshore drilling attempt. The past governments, however, made no big bets on such attempts. It was left to Prime Minister Khan to hype up the undiscovered oil reservoirs and expose his reliance on jackpots. He would do himself and the country a big service should he hire some good communication consultants.

All is not lost in the 17 failed attempts. Experts say drilling for oil is a high risk-high reward business and that failures are not taken as losses. India’s Bombay High Well discovery after 40 failed attempts has been cited as a graphic example. No one can challenge the data or disagree with the argument but one thing needs to be remembered: the Bombay High Well did not make India an oil exporting country. The nation can wait for its share of good news without the prime minister and his cabinet promising some every now and then rather than focus on the real challenges.

Hopes of a transformation resulting from the exploitation of coalmines in Thar are similarly exaggerated. The low-quality coal will at best make a minor contribution to national economy. The coal-fired technology is already becoming a thing of the past in most of the world.

A drilling ending in a dry well is not the end of the world as long as the government can be persuaded to realise that national economies are not run on prospects of jackpots. Pakistan’s economic challenges are real, but they are not with solutions. This is a land of great potential and many an untapped reservoir. . *