An organisation named Hydrocarbon Unit under the Energy and Mineral Resources Division has been without any activities for the past eight months and the government is also undecided about its future.
A total of Tk3 lakh is spent every month for the organisation, which was formed to act as a think tank of the Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry.
“Our fate has been dwindling since the second phase of a project expired in December 2013,” Director General of Hydrocarbon Unit Mohammad Mosaddeque Ali told the Dhaka Tribune.
“I joined the organisation recently. But we have no work at this moment and we have a total of 11 staff members,” he said.
Mosaddeque said they were planning to meet the energy division secretary to discuss how to re-activate the organisation.
“We have sent a proposal through the Energy and Mineral Resources Division to the Bangladesh Public Service Commission to recruit manpower,” he said.
“We need to appoint new hands to keep the unit alive,” he added.
On May 28, 2008, the government introduced an organogram of 26-strong manpower to give Hydrocarbon Unit a permanent shape. On July 22 last year, the Energy Division introduced a set of rules for recruitment for the organisation.
The Hydrocarbon Unit is responsible for assessing undiscovered resources at regular intervals, managing data on oil and gas sectors, observing activities of production-sharing contracts (PSCs), analysing internal and regional gas markets, formulating exploration and depletion policies, establishing contact forums for the private sector, and working as the technical arm of the ministry.
In its capacity of an organ of the Energy and Mineral Resources Division, it has provided necessary opinion, analyses and information on issues like the PSC, gas demand and supply, gas field development, pricing, future planning, legal issues, energy policy and privatisation.
DG Mosaddeque Ali said: “We do not even have a permanent office. The temporary office that we have is not sufficient.”
Ijaz Hossain, a professor of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, told the Dhaka Tribune: “The government should activate the unit as soon as possible for helping develop the hydrocarbon sector.”
When contacted, Nasrul Hamid, state minister for power, energy and mineral resources, said: “We will make the unit functional very soon.”
The Hydrocarbon Unit was established in July 1999 in the form of a project aimed at strengthening the Hydrocarbon Unit under a grant from the Norwegian government.
An institutional cooperation contract was also signed between the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate and the Hydrocarbon Unit.
The work of the first phase continued until March 2006, and the second phase started in April 2006 and continued until December last year.
The Hydrocarbon Unit institutionalised the resource and reserve estimation process in the country by developing a group of expert professionals who are now capable of doing the job on their own.
Its mini data bank, which contains gas production reserve and resource database, has been used to generate monthly reports.