CPEC Uplifting Pakistan’s Energy Sector
CPEC Uplifting Pakistan’s Energy Sector: CPEC starting from China’s Kashgar in the west and ends at Gwadar in Balochistan, is transforming Pakistan’s energy sector by cutting 13-14 hours of daily power outages in 2013 to zero in 70 % areas in Pakistan.
It has also helped the South Asian country achieve 5.3 percent economic growth in 2017, the highest in last 10 years. China and Pakistan has agreed to strengthen cooperation in the fields of oil and gas, electricity and power grids, and focus on promoting the construction of major projects of thermal power, hydropower, coal gasification and renewable power generation.
It aims at supporting power transmission networks, in order to enhance its power transmission and supply reliability. Furthermore to Promote the cooperation in the development of oil and gas resources, research on the integrated vision and demand of China and Pakistan oil and gas cooperation so as to improve the cooperation between the two countries and diversify oil supplies. The opinions of establishing oil refineries and storages along the CPEC route will also be considered.
Chinese enterprises made a non-financial direct investment of 14.36 billion dollars in 59 countries along the Belt and Road in 2017. 7,217 overseas projects were signed by Chinese enterprises with 61 countries along the Belt and Road, the value of the newly-signed contracts amounting to 144.32 billion dollars.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi added that China will work on both hardware connectivity of infrastructure and software connectivity policy, regulation, and standards. The initiative will be economically viable, high standard and beneficial to the world. Over a 100 countries and organizations are associated with the initiative while over 80 of them have signed cooperation agreements with China.
The CPEC, a flagship project under the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, intends to promote economic cooperation between Pakistan and China. Proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, the initiative aims to create greater trade, infrastructure and people-to-people links between Asia, Europe, Africa and beyond by reviving and expanding the ancient Silk Road routes. According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, Chinese companies have built 75 zones for economic and trade cooperation in 24 countries along the Belt and Road routes, contributing more than 2.21 billion US dollars in tax revenue and creating almost 209,000 local jobs.