Taliban’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum (MoMP) has recently initiated a natural gas pipeline project in Afghanistan’s north.
The Ministry announced in a series of tweets that the project was inaugurated on Saturday in Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan province, attended by Taliban’s Minister of Mines and Petroleum, Sheikh Shahabuddin Delawar, and other senior Taliban officials.
The statement added that a 94.5-kilometer gas pipeline will pass from Sheberghan city through Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province, and will be used in the fertilizer industry, glass manufacturing, and in Ghazanfar IPP company to produce electricity.
This gas pipeline project will also reach residential houses in the near future, the statement noted.
The cost of the pipeline is estimated to be 609 million Afghani (over US$ 7,000,000).
MoMP had earlier announced plans to put a number of Afghanistan’s oil and liquid gas fields up for auction, prompting the willingness from some countries to invest in the country’s rich oil and gas resources.
In January, the Taliban signed a 25-year project worth $540 million with a Chinese company to extract oil from an area of 4,500 square meters in the northern provinces of Sar-e-Pol, Jowzjan, and Faryab, estimated to contain 87 million barrels of oil.
