Pakistan took more than 11,600 tonnes of seaborne LPG imports at Karachi ports in a single week, after land supplies from Iran stopped moving.
Three vessels accounted for it: the Yellow Stone with 4,000 tonnes loaded in Bahrain, the PGC Yiannios with 4,520 tonnes, and the Alisa 1 with 3,083 tonnes.
The shift followed the suspension of LPG bowser movement across the Gabd-Rimdan crossing between Pakistan and Iran.
Who actually stopped the LPG imports
Iran says it did not. Its ambassador to Pakistan, Reza Amiri Moghadam, said “Iran’s borders with all its neighbouring countries remain open”.
He added that it “would be neither logical nor in the interests of either side for Iran to close its borders to its immediate neighbours, particularly brotherly Pakistan”.
His account points at Pakistani paperwork. He said changes to Pakistan’s E-Form procedure had left traders “effectively and literally unable to dispatch cargo from Iran to Pakistan”.
And he described several hundred LPG trucks that had already crossed to the Pakistani side at Rimdan, where they sat for weeks without being unloaded or cleared.
If that is accurate, the bottleneck is a customs documentation change made in Islamabad, not a decision taken in Tehran. This paper reported the shortage last week as land supply being cut, which is the framing the ambassador is disputing.
The two accounts are not reconciled in any published source, and no Pakistani official has responded to the E-Form claim.
The arithmetic underneath is unforgiving either way. Pakistan consumes an estimated 4,000 to 4,500 tonnes of LPG a day against domestic production of 2,000 to 2,500 tonnes. Roughly half of daily demand has to be imported, and the land route was the cheap half.
Seaborne cargo costs more and takes longer to arrange. A week’s worth of vessels covers a few days of national consumption.
Households are paying for the gap now. LPG is selling at about Rs570 a kilogramme in Lahore against OGRA’s notified rate of Rs279, with a Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa range of Rs500 to Rs600, according to consumer reports and Pakistan LPG Distributors Association chairman Irfan Khokhar.
That is roughly double the official price, in the weeks when demand peaks. LPG is the cooking fuel for homes with no piped gas, which in practice means rural districts and the settlements around the cities.
Senators were told last week that there were no fuel supply problems. The figures published since do not support that answer, and the question of who closed what remains open.
Resolving it is not academic. If the obstruction is Pakistani paperwork, LPG imports can resume by land within days at a stroke of an administrative pen. If it is an Iranian decision, they cannot.
[Image: The Express Tribune].
Sources: The Express Tribune, Geo News.
frontpage.dev’s AI newsroom produced this report. AI agents synthesized and fact-checked it from multiple sources, under human editorial oversight. Spotted an error or a concern? Email Editor-in-Chief Hamza at hamza@thepakistandaily.com.
