Fresh supplies of liquefied petroleum gas have begun reaching Lahore, and the arrival has taken some of the heat out of a market that had been charging households far above the official rate. According to the report that first carried the news, the price in the city has come down by fifty rupees a kilogram since the new stocks arrived. Yet the relief is, for now, more symbolic than real, because the fuel is still being sold at around five hundred and fifty rupees a kilogram, a level that leaves buyers paying roughly twice what the regulator says they should pay.
Local dealers were cautiously hopeful, saying a further and more substantial fall could follow during the day as the new supply works its way through the market. That hope matters, because a consignment reaching a city does not by itself reset prices at the neighbourhood shop. Stocks have to be unloaded, distributed and filled into cylinders, and at every step there is room for delay, for old expensive stock to be sold first, and for the official price to be ignored. Until cheaper gas is actually in customers’ hands, the news will mean little to a family waiting to cook dinner.
The scale of the gap is best understood against the price fixed by the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority. For October, the regulator set the maximum consumer price at two hundred and seventy-nine rupees and thirty-four paisas a kilogram, or three thousand two hundred and ninety-six rupees for the standard eleven point eight kilogram domestic cylinder. That figure was itself an increase of about twenty-one rupees a kilogram on September, linked by the regulator to a jump of almost ten per cent in the Saudi Aramco contract price. At five hundred and fifty rupees a kilogram, by contrast, a standard cylinder costs close to six thousand five hundred rupees, almost double the official price.
The chairman of the LPG Distributors Association, Irfan Khokhar, has said that companies in the trade were charging inflated rates and that rising demand was being used as cover for illegal profiteering. He reported that gas was being sold across the country at between five hundred and six hundred rupees a kilogram, and he warned that prices could climb further if supply was disrupted again. His central question was a pointed one: how can the market settle down, he asked, if the rates fixed by the government are simply not put into practice? He called for action against black marketing and for those behind it to be held to account.
That complaint sits inside a much larger supply problem. Pakistan uses roughly four thousand to four thousand five hundred tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas a day, while domestic production is only around two thousand to two thousand five hundred tonnes, so the rest must be imported. In peak winter, demand can rise to six thousand or seven thousand tonnes a day as households turn to cylinders for cooking and heating. A market balanced that tightly has almost no room for disruption, and in the middle of October it suffered one, when trading points with Iran were closed and a source of supply the country had relied on was suddenly cut off.
The disruption then collided with a dispute over enforcement. In the last weekend of October, thousands of dealers shut their shops in Lahore and other cities, with reports putting the number at between five thousand five hundred and six thousand outlets. The dealers said enforcement teams had confiscated filling pumps, each worth tens of thousands of rupees, and had fined shopkeepers, while larger companies and alleged profiteers went untouched. Its effect on customers was clear: people carried empty cylinders from shop to shop, queues lengthened at outlets that stayed open, and some households turned to coal and firewood, pushing up those prices as well.
There have since been signs that supply is beginning to move again. Two imported vessels discharged gas at Port Qasim on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of October, and commercial movement resumed at the Gabd-Rimdan crossing with Iran. Those developments explain why fresh stocks are now reported in Lahore, and why dealers expect prices to soften further. But earlier arrivals have not produced immediate, widespread relief: a shipment landing at a port still has to clear, travel inland and reach distributors at a price that respects the official ceiling.
The timing could hardly be worse, because winter is approaching and piped gas is stretched thinnest then. Reports have suggested that domestic consumers could receive piped gas for only around eight hours a day in winter, limited to cooking times, which would push more households towards cylinders at exactly the moment when cylinder prices are highest. Citizens have already complained that they are paying regular gas bills while also having to buy expensive liquefied gas, a double charge that falls most heavily on daily wage earners and lower middle class families. For Lahore, the test is simple: until a household can buy a cylinder for something close to the official price, this arrival marks a pause in the crisis, not its end.
