On Sunday, a high-level Chevron delegation called on Prime Minister Tarique Rahman at the Secretariat. The two sides discussed investment in Bangladesh's existing gas fields and the exploration of new ones.
State media described it as a productive courtesy call. It was. But it is also worth reading for what it quietly reveals.
Chevron already produces roughly half of Bangladesh's domestic natural gas from fields -- Bibiyana, Jalalabad -- that have anchored the national supply for two decades.
That a government facing the worst energy crisis in a generation must now ask this same company, warmly, to look for more, says something about how the last three decades were spent.
A gas-dependent country cannot indefinitely defer the one task that matters most: Exploring for its own gas.
The numbers make the point on their own. Since 1998, Bangladesh has drilled on the order of 100 exploration wells. India drilled 545 in a single year. Bangladesh's own scientists have said for years that the country remains among the least explored of the world's promising gas basins, and that each new discovery raises the odds of finding the next one nearby.
Part of the shortfall is capacity, not just will: BAPEX, Bangladesh's state exploration company, has neither the rig fleet nor the seismic and drilling budget to explore the country's remaining prospective basins on its own, and was never resourced to.
Where domestic capacity is this constrained, the honest response is to widen the field -- inviting international exploration companies, under transparent production-sharing terms, into blocks BAPEX cannot reach alone, rather than treating exploration as a task for one state company operating far below the scale the country's geology demands.
Instead, for years, the money that might have expanded that capacity went to subsidizing LNG cargoes bought to cover the gap that under-exploration created.
The human cost of that choice now has an address: Ashuganj, Brahmanbaria. The state-owned fertilizer factory there once ran around the clock, employed more than 1,200 people, and produced over 1,000 tons of urea a day for a country of 170 million that depends on it to grow food.
It has sat idle since March 2025 -- 18 months now -- because there is no gas to run it.
It is not alone. Of the five major urea plants under the Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation, four were shut down this year for the same reason; only one remains intermittently operational, and officials do not expect it to last.
A country that cannot keep its own fertilizer plants running is not managing an inconvenience. It is confronting a threat to food security that deserves to be treated as such.
None of this means Chevron's investment isn't welcome, or that Sunday's meeting was the wrong move.
Expanding output at mature, already-producing fields is sensible and overdue, and it can happen faster than new exploration can.
But there is a difference between welcoming a partner's investment and depending on that partner more than a country should, and Bangladesh's own recent history is a useful caution here.
We have seen what happens when Bangladesh lets a single external actor set the terms of its energy supply on opaque terms: The Adani Godda contract, signed without public disclosure, now embeds a price roughly 40-80% above what comparable power costs on India's own exchange, into every electricity bill in the country.
Chevron's relationship with Bangladesh is a different and considerably healthier one -- three decades of transparent production-sharing agreements, not a bilateral contract negotiated out of public view -- and that distinction matters.
Even so, the broader lesson holds: A country that builds its own exploration and negotiating capacity chooses its partnerships from a position of strength. A country that does not will keep finding itself, respectfully, asking.
The government's own five-point plan, announced in September, gets the direction right: Expand domestic production, strengthen BAPEX, drill 106 new wells, and open the door to outside exploration expertise where domestic capacity falls short.
The Chevron meeting is a welcome down payment on the near-term half of that plan -- the mature fields that can produce faster. It should not become a substitute for the harder half: The seismic surveys, the BAPEX budget, and the wider invitation to international exploration partners that the twelve-year reserve clock now makes urgent rather than optional.
The family in Brahmanbaria who watched Ashuganj go quiet did not choose LNG subsidies over BAPEX funding, did not sign the Adani contract, and did not decide, year after year, that exploration could wait.
They are simply the ones living with those choices now, in lost wages and strained food security.
A courtesy call at the Secretariat is a welcome step, but it is not itself the solution. That will require a government prepared to fund exploration, and to open the field to those who can help expand it, as if the twelve-year reserve clock were real -- because it is.
Ahad Chowdhury, PhD, is a geologist and environmental scientist based in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.