Mega oil city to be constructed in Gawadar under CPEC
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has decided to construct a mega oil city at Gawadar on 80,000 acres under much hyped China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
This mega oil city will be used for transportation of imported oil through the Gawadar Port to China. The oil will be imported from Gulf and will be stored at this proposed mega Gawadar oil city.
The distance to China will be reduced, and it will take just seven days to cover the distance from Gawadar to Chinese border as import through western China took almost 40 days by covering double distance.
“We have forwarded PC-1 to the Ministry of Petroleum for acquiring 80,000 acres for this mega oil city at Gawadar with estimated cost of Rs10 billion. There will be additional cost for construction of its storage and other aligned facilities with the help of investments,” Director General, Gawadar Development Authority (GDA), Dr Sajjad H Baloch, told Islamabad based journalists who visited the Gawadar Port last week. This visit was arranged by the Planning Commission in order to show case different ongoing projects under CPEC.
A refinery, petrochemical industries and storage will be established in the oil city, he added.
The Gawadar oil city, he said, would be used for storing oil for its onward transportation to China. Usually, it takes 40 days for vessels to transport oil to China but via Pakistan it will reach China within 7 days, he added. He said that the total area of Gawadar Model City is 290,000 acres which includes 160,000 acres of residential area while the remaining is for industrial purposes. A Chinese company is working on the Model City Plan and it will be ready by August 14, 2018.
To another query regarding different measures for overcoming water shortages at Gawadar, he said that the current water requirement stood at six million gallons per day and there is no direct water supply taking place to the area. Two MGD water is being supplied from two water small dams through tankers and nearest distance is almost 70 kilometres.
“We have a deficit of four million gallons per day in water supply to the area,” he said and added that by 2020, the water requirement of Gawadar would be 12 million gallons per day, for which additional arrangements were made to get 10 million gallons of water.
New Gawadar International Airport: Earlier, the journalists visited the site of proposed new airport at Gawadar. The China Airport Construction Group Engineering Company representative Jianxin Liao told the visiting journalists that they were conducting soil investigation on the basis of which, the design of new airport at Gawadar will be finalised. He said that the procured land for this new airport stood at 4,300 acres, and this airport will possess capacity to handle one million passengers on annual basis. He said that by April this year the design will be completed after which the cost of the project will be estimated. It will be the biggest airport of Pakistan.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) representative Zohaib Soomro said that the initial cost of the project was estimated at $228 million, but its cost would be finalised after completion of design, and it would be estimated again.
The sources said that it would be premature to give any assessment related to cost, but it would be more than $2 billion to $2.7 billion at least if we want to construct state of the art airport in accordance with international standards