Gas rich, cash poor The burden of the subterranean riches

Hello, how are you all, hope you are well. In today's blog we will know about Gas rich, cash poor The burden of the subterranean riches, August 27, 2026

Massive natural gas reserves could herald economic change but colossal infrastructure costs and geopolitical obstacles mean that energy rich countries are fighting hard to get the money they need to tap that wealth.

Trillions of cubic feet of fuel means instant release from energy poverty, huge export income and rapid industrialization. Gigantic deep-water drilling rigs, processing and gasification units, domestic pipelines and LNG export terminals demand infrastructure expenditures that can easily run to several times a developing country’s entire annual fiscal budget. In lack of immediate, unfettered access to deep pockets of capital, there is a great number of fields that are simply locked beneath the earth, just miles beneath.

A huge gas find can become a curse in the absence of transparent revenue management, local supply obligations and clear regulatory frameworks. The dig below the surface could turn into the classic "resource curse" and leave the host country in foreign debt, rattled by the world commodity market and still shocked at its own electricity bill.

With virtually no domestic capital or modern technical resources at disposal, the government has to most of the times depend heavily on import loans or go into production sharing agreements with international oil & gas majors.

The latter often means that a huge portion of the economic blockbuster is given up and that the international firms also control the operation and even make strategic operational decisions. All that natural gas wealth only answers part of the damn equation. An country's energy potential remains only a theory, until it has built up domestic financial and technical capacity to bring it to the surface.

✍️Ujala

Scholar from University of Delhi, INDIA