BNP’s Dark Inheritance
Bangladesh's ongoing gas crisis has paralyzed industry and sent Dhaka scrambling to Qatar and India for emergency fuel. But the root cause goes beyond a damaged LNG terminal, exposing the crippling legacy of Hasina-era energy corruption that the BNP government must now dismantle.
In a Nutshell:
- Bangladesh's current gas crisis began July 21, 2026, when a fire damaged the control panel of Excelerate Energy's FSRU at Moheshkhali, forcing a shutdown despite one boiler remaining functional.
- The terminal partially resumed on August 6 but shut down again on August 13-14, then ran completely out of LNG on August 19, dropping national gas supply to around 2,185 mmcfd (Million Cubic Feet per Day) against demand of 3,800 mmcfd.
- At a CPD dialogue on August 13, Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Iqbal Hassan Mahmood Tuku admitted: "I have nothing else to do in this crisis right now," saying his role was largely confined to managing load-shedding while foreign engineers completed FSRU repairs.
- Both boilers were confirmed repaired by August 17, but the terminal could only run at a fraction of capacity due to no fresh LNG cargo being available.
- Over 900 textile mills, along with steel, paper, and ceramics factories, shut down as industrial gas allocation was diverted to power generation instead.
- Excelerate's FSRU resumed supply again on August 22 after a new cargo arrived, restoring national gas supply to around 2,300 mmcfd, still short of the 3,800 mmcfd demand.
- Finance Minister Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowdhury said on August 22 that the Middle East war has added $4-5 billion to Bangladesh's fuel import bill and that the crisis "won't be fixed overnight".
- Prime Minister Tarique Rahman announced on 15 August that the government will present a comprehensive 10-year energy plan before parliament on 27 August.
Context
The crisis traces back to systemic sabotage under Sheikh Hasina's 15-year rule, when the 2010 "indemnity" law let her government award power contracts without competitive tender, funneling an estimated Tk 1.06 trillion in capacity charges to politically connected firms like Summit Group, which alone earned roughly Tk 36,000 crore over the period while frequently running plants at just 25-30% of proposed capacity. Decisions on quick-rental awards were reportedly made by Summit Group itself rather than the ministry, with state officials serving mainly to collect bribes and launder funds abroad, while a 718 MW JERA plant and other completed facilities sat idle collecting payments despite Petrobangla being unable to supply even half the gas needed to run existing capacity. New paragraph.
Why it matters
The minister's own admission of having "nothing else to do" but manage load-shedding shows how a decade of Hasina-era contract corruption left BNP with almost no operational slack to absorb shocks like the Iran war . That fragility is now visible diplomatically: Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman led a delegation to Doha on August 18-19, where Bangladesh and Qatar agreed to form joint working groups on energy and finance after Strait of Hormuz tensions had already cut Qatar's 2026 LNG deliveries to Bangladesh by roughly half, with Qatar's leadership offering only a general assurance of "all possible support" rather than committed volumes. Simultaneously, Dhaka has leaned on the Numaligarh–Parbatipur pipeline — a roughly 200,000-tonne-annual-capacity link with India — seeking additional diesel, with New Delhi's Ministry of External Affairs saying it would decide based on its own refining capacity and domestic needs. That two-front scramble — courting Qatar for LNG and India for diesel simultaneously — underscores how thin Bangladesh's energy buffer has become: a government reduced to requesting emergency fuel from two different neighbors in the same week is one with essentially no domestic shock absorber left, a direct legacy of the capacity-payment and no-bid contract system the interim government began dismantling but BNP has yet to finish confronting
What we think
The National Review Committee's findings on Adani and SS Power's "capacity trap" (a $428 million annual fixed charge regardless of output) need public resolution. Reviving the cancelled third FSRU with stricter enforcement would reduce reliance on a two-terminal system that keeps converting routine faults into national emergencies, and the minister's own diversification plans — Bhola gas, Malaysian LNG, solar expansion need execution timelines. Above all, treating this as purely an "Iran war fuel cost" problem lets BNP avoid the harder political task of confronting the Hasina-era capacity-payment structure it inherited but has so far chosen not to dismantle.