Bangladesh’s Top Utility to Invest $2.5 Billion in LNG, Power

(Bloomberg) -- Summit Corp., Bangladesh’s largest private electricity producer, intends to spend $2.5 billion to build power plants and a liquefied natural gas import terminal.

The company plans to complete a 750 megawatt gas-fired power plant, along with the LNG import terminal that will supply the imported gas, in three years, Muhammed Aziz Khan, chairman of Summit Corp., said in a phone interview on Wednesday. It also aims to develop a 350 megawatt dual-fuel plant and a 150 megawatt facility powered by heavy fuel oil.

“The plan is ambitious, but not audacious,” Khan said. “It’s aligned with the government’s vision of providing electricity to all by 2021.”

The government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has set a goal of lighting every home over the next five years. Almost a quarter of the population lacks access to grid-connected power and outages lead to costly disruptions, according to International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank Group that finances private projects in developing countries.

Summit Corp. is tapping international lenders, such as International Finance Corp., to fund the projects. The World Bank unit has already committed to investing as much as $170 million in Power International Pte Ltd., a company floated by Summit Corp. in Singapore for raising funds from international markets, Khan said.

Summit Corp. currently has a generation capacity of about 1,500 megawatts, which accounts for 15 percent of the country’s capacity, Khan said.

“If the government fails to implement its own coal-based power projects, our market share in electricity generation will grow to 19 percent from 15 percent,” Khan said.

--With assistance from Debjit Chakraborty To contact the reporter on this story: Arun Devnath in Dhaka at adevnath@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Arijit Ghosh at aghosh@bloomberg.net, Alpana Sarma, Ramsey Al-Rikabi