‘No mysterious, undiscovered oilfield’: Pakistan puzzled where Trump found ‘massive oil reserves’

US President Donald Trump has hailed “massive oil reserves” in Pakistan that he wants to exploit. But Pakistan is perplexed as it is not aware of any such reserves.

As part of his alignment with Pakistan amid ongoing anti-India campaign, Trump has reached a trade deal with Pakistan that involves joint oil extraction. He said in July that “Pakistan and the United States will work together on developing their massive oil reserves”.

“We are in the process of choosing the oil company that will lead this Partnership. Who knows? Maybe, they’ll be selling oil to India some day!” Trump added.

However, the fact remains that Pakistan imports 80 per cent of its oil and its daily oil production is around one-tenth of India’s.

An official at a Pakistani state-owned oil and gas company told Financial Times that Trump’s claim of oil reserves in Pakistan was “completely out of left field”.

A second official said, “There is no mysterious, undiscovered oilfield that is going to put out 1 billion barrels.”

Is Trump chasing oil? Or snake oil?

American and Pakistani officials have been optimistic publicly. The basis of their optimism is an estimate from 2015 by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that said Pakistan’s Lower Indus Basin region may have more than 9 billion barrels of onshore shale oil.

Such a reserve would put Pakistan among the 10 largest sources of onshore oil in the world.

However, the EIA’s report had just made a preliminary estimate from preliminary seismic data, not confirmed findings, according to Rystad Energy, a consultancy.

There has been little progress on oil and gas exploration and extraction in Pakistan, according to Prateek Pandey, the head of oil and research in the Asia-Pacific region for Rystad.

“These prospective [shale] resources remain years away from commercial viability,” Pandey told FT.

For decades, Pakistani leaders have dreamt of finding oil in their country and using that as a magic bullet to solve their socioeconomic ills by replicating the prosperity of Gulf countries. This has, however, led to embarrassing episodes, such as the one in 2019 involving former Prime Minister Imran Khan.

In 2019, Imran announced that a consortium of Italy-based Eni and American oil and gas giant Exxon was boring into an Arabian Sea well that had the potential to wipe out Pakistan’s fossil fuel import bill “for the next 50 years”. However, just hours after the claim, the Eni-Exxon exploration team announced they had abandoned the site as they found nothing but water at the site. Both the companies departed Pakistan soon.