Gas supply remained disrupted almost everywhere in the country for nearly 20 hours yesterday following a leak in the processing plant of the Bibiyana gas field in Habiganj.
Although the leak was detected Saturday evening and repaired around 6:15am on Sunday, household and industrial users did not see normal supply until late in the afternoon.
Household chores were badly hampered, and gas-based power plants and industries had to be kept shut for most of the day.
“Production at the gas field was suspended from 6:45pm to 4am. The authorities took the time to repair the leak. The gas line was repaired at around 6:15am after repairing,” Petrobangla Chairman Hossain Monsur told the Dhaka Tribune.
But household and industrial consumers could not resume work right away because the supply in the national grid took eight hours to regain normal pressure following the completion of repair work.
Bibiyana, the country’s largest gas field, is operated by the US-based company Chevron. The field supplies around 850m cubic feet of gas per day to the national grid.
An official of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry said many gas-powered industries had to be kept shut.
A consumer from the Mohammadpur area in Dhaka said they did not get gas all day. Electricity supply was also cut down, and there was an acute crisis of water throughout the day, he added.
Regarding the power outage, Member of the Power Development Board Tamal Chakraborty said: “Many of our power plants had to be kept shut due to shortage in gas supply. That had led to the disrupted power supply and the suffering of the consumers.”
AKM Shafiqur Rahman, managing director of Bakhrabad Gas Distribution Company Ltd, said: “Household consumers were the worst sufferers. But the situation began to return to normal in the afternoon.”
“Chevron’s process plant at Bibiyana has a capacity of 850mmcfd. They had been processing at full capacity for a number of months which might have put extra pressure on the plant,” Md Aminur Rahman, managing director of Gas Transmission Company Limited, told the Dhaka Tribune.
He added that the huge disruption occurred because Bibiyana contributes nearly a third of the aggregate national production of 2200mmcfd (millions of cubic feet per day).
