Tragedy of the Burnt Match Stick 

When I was completing my Masters degree at the Dhaka University in the late 1960, a comforting myth echoed across the classrooms and Chinese restaurants of Dhaka in East Pakistan: It was claimed that the country was floating on a sea of natural gas so vast that it would easily power our future for the next 150 years. 

There was a euphoric sense of endless abundance, a belief that nature had permanently insulated us from scarcity. Yet, walking through urban neighbourhoods of Dhanmondi & Bailey Road during that era of early discoveries revealed a disturbing behavioural paradox�"one that had nothing to do with geology and everything to do with human action.  

I visited my friends who had got married and I found that in most households, kitchen stoves were left burning twenty-four hours a day, filling rooms with an unceasing, blue hiss. I asked most of them the reason behind this and was quite shocked that it had become a common custom to keep the gas flames on as turning off the flame meant needing to strike another match stick to relight it later. 

At that period in East Pakistan in the 1960 and in early Bangladesh had a much smaller population and almost no heavy industry and a tiny power grid.

To the average homeowner, a physical matchstick was a tangible expense worth saving, while the invisible gas flowing through the pipes was treated as a bottomless, costless gift. In other homes, open burners were routinely used as makeshift clothes dryers, with garments draped precariously on strings over flames simply because it was a rainy season and it cost the household absolutely nothing extra.

A nation that cannot secure its own domestic energy grid inevitably loses a significant degree of its bargaining leverage in the arena of economic diplomacy 

The government charged a flat monthly fee for residential gas connections rather than metering actual cubic consumption, people treated natural gas as if it were air or sunlight�"infinite and indestructible. We bred a generation of citizens who thought only of their immediate comfort, completely blind to the future of the nation or the mathematical certainty that our fields would one day run dry.

Now Bangladesh economy has grown massively. Natural gas is the "lifeblood" of the nation, providing over half of the country's electricity and powering massive, multi-billion-dollar industries like ready-made garments, steel, and ceramics. In industrial belts like Gazipur and Narsingdi, textile mills and ready-made garment (RMG) factories are gasping for power, forcing machinery to sit idle and cutting production lines down to a fraction of their capacity. The rate of power consumption skyrocketed beyond what anyone in the 1960s anticipated.

The old gas fields like Titas, Habiganj, Kailashtilla and the massive Bibiana field discovered later are now old, depleted and dropping production by hundreds of millions of cubic feet. To fix the widening gap between supply and demand previous governments turned to importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and oil instead of drilling domestically.

Bangladesh has fallen into a severe "import trap." To bridge the massive deficit between supply and demand, we are forced to spend our precious, hard-earned U.S. dollar reserves on hyper-expensive foreign Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and fuel. Our economic stability is now heavily chained to volatile global markets, shipping disruptions, and geopolitical shocks entirely beyond our control. 

A nation that cannot secure its own domestic energy grid inevitably loses a significant degree of its bargaining leverage in the arena of economic diplomacy.

The absolute and clearest example of bad management is the Bay of Bengal in 2012 and 2014. Bangladesh won historic maritime boundary disputes against Myanmar and India securing a massive area of the sea. Looking at our blue economy, Bangladesh did virtually nothing while Myanmar and India mapped the Bay of Bengal, secured their energy futures and strengthened their position in the region. They immediately invited global giants, drilled deep sea oil and discovered massive gas fields right next to the Bangladesh borders.  

Between 2000 and 2022, Bangladesh drilled an average of just one exploratory well per year.  

The reason for the delay was excessive red tape, unattractive contract terms for international companies and endless delays meant that Bangladesh offshore blocks sat completely empty and untouched. Drilling domestically was not done due to severe failure of state planning, bureaucratic delay, and weak governance leading to drastic energy crisis.  

As the country made more industrial advance we faced a greater crisis. This is not a failure of nature, it is a direct result of poor management, bureaucratic neglect, weak strategic planning leading to a failure to drill.

Geologists believe that in Bangladesh there is a vast amount of natural gas trapped deep underground and in offshore of the country. The crisis exists because the country stopped exploring them.  Experts call Bangladesh one of the least explored hydrocarbon basins in the world.

Currently, as we endure hours of load-shedding and look at the long lines wrapping around CNG stations, we must finally confront the painful truth: we cannot demand a sustainable nation while practicing poor management.  Resources are mathematically finite, but our sense of civic responsibility must be infinite. 

To fix the widening gap between supply and demand, governments turned to importing expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil. This created a fragile system, the loss of valuable foreign currency thereby declining our foreign reserve. 

Furthermore, international partners like The World Bank or IMF & foreign direct investors watch how a state manages its internal assets with a critical eye. When a nation allows its resources to be mismanaged, signalling an institutional lack of discipline, it harms its own global credibility. A chronic energy crisis driven by a legacy of domestic waste, new industrial demands and poor governance raises flags for foreign investors, who hesitate to commit capital to a country where power lines are unpredictable and factory pressures fluctuate. While we sat passively on our untouched blocks in the Bay of Bengal, our regional neighbours aggressively mapped their waters, secured their energy futures, and strengthened their geopolitical hands

International partners, foreign investors and global financial institutions like the World Bank or IMF closely monitor how a country manages its internal assets. When a nation allows billions in resources to literally leak away, it signals a deeper institutional lack of efficiency. 

Energy is the ultimate tool of geopolitics. By failing to transition from an attitude of slow progress to one of aggressive exploration and conservation, Bangladesh missed to become a regional energy hub shifting us from a potential exporter to a vulnerable solicitor of international aid and loans.      

The current government has finally shifted away from its passive approach, launching aggressive campaigns to drill over 100 new exploratory and development wells to drill and finally jumpstart domestic production. Works on 30 wells have already been completed adding roughly 140 million cubic feet of gas. Also foreign investors are invited to drill gas.
 
So there is hope and we must also explore our blue economy and become an energy hub in the region.