By Sardar Khan Niazi
Modern society of today relies on energy in its existence, energy is the driving force for the economy, and the energy sector is accountable for climate change. Because of these causes energy plays a major role also in the political arena and is termed as a strategic political issue reaching the top of political agendas.
Today the global energy market is facing numerous challenges: rising demand for energy, depletion of natural energy sources, fluctuant prices, and climate change issues being among the most serious ones.
The correlation between energy and economic development is tight, and as the level of global welfare rises, the demand for energy increases. This trend is particularly obvious in developed countries that are the main energy consumers and unfortunately environmental polluters because the energy sector is accountable for the greatest amount of CO2 emissions.
Globally the most widely used are non-renewable fossil energy sources, accounting for 4/5 of the global energy consumption, out of which the most commonly used are oil and natural gas.
Resultantly, the world has met a situation where supply can no longer satisfy the growing global appetite for energy. This has encouraged countries, businesses, and individuals to search for alternatives.
The Russia-Ukraine war has caused an international energy catastrophe while this conflict has proved to be a double edge weapon for the entire world, which not only exhausted the international oil reserves but also made the purchase of essential energy products a too-expensive luxury for the countries in maximum portions of the world.
Traditionally, Europe, an ever-energy-deficient region has been satisfying half of the energy requirements through Russian oil and gas for over more than a few decades.
Surprisingly, Russia and its European allies have used energy and economic sanctions as weapons against each other during the ongoing conflict and both sides equally suffered losses.
The weaponization of energy and tit-for-tat actions these days have cut across the borders of Russia and Europe and stretched out to other nations as the United States and G7 allies have followed a plan to put a price cap on oil and gas to decrease the facility of finances to Russian war machine against Ukraine.
The United States has moved toward OPEC Plus nations including Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to overcome global price hikes but the international cartel reduced its production by 6-8 percent for the next quarter.
Russia has now turned Eastward by establishing an energy hub in Turkey along with a renewed thrust for great energy trade with China, Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan as prospective users of the Russian pipeline gas.
Russia will also send its natural gas to the markets of Afghanistan either through Central Asian infrastructure or from the territory of Iran on a swap basis for each other consumer in neighboring regions.
In addition to providing Russian gas to European nations through the Russo-Turk energy corridor, Moscow also is going to export Russian gas to Pakistan. The development came days after a Pakistani delegation led by State Minister for Petroleum Musadik Malik visited Moscow last week to negotiate the deal with Russian authorities.
Advanced countries are fighting the consequences of international price climbs while the poor nations are at the threshold of breakdown and forced to fulfill their awful food insecurity, energy, and economic requirements from anybody.
In order to diversify energy production toward renewables to lower import bills, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and U.S. ambassador Donald Blome inaugurated jointly a US-funded project to improve power generation capacity at the Mangla hydropower plant.
The $150 million project will add 300 megawatts of additional power to the plant’s capacity, enough to provide power to 100,000 households and 2 million Pakistanis.
