All four provinces object to Islamabad's oil and gas plan, cite Article 172(3)

A federal summary on how oil and gas are administered has drawn objections from all four provinces, and the fight is about who signs off on what.

The federal government has proposed removing the Council of Common Interests from routine administrative matters in the oil and gas sector. Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan have all filed objections.

What each province is asking for

• Punjab wants every province represented on the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority alongside federal members, rather than a federal body making calls that land on provincial consumers.
• Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan want constitutional protection for joint ownership and joint decision-making written into whatever replaces the current arrangement.
• Balochistan has additionally pointed to Articles 154 and 156, which define the CCI's authority and composition.

The article everyone is citing is Article 172(3) of the Constitution: mineral oil and natural gas within a province or the territorial waters adjoining it vest jointly and equally in the federal government and that province. Entry 2 of the Fourth Schedule places mineral oil and natural gas on the Federal Legislative List Part II, which is precisely the part the CCI supervises.

The summary has gone to the finance, planning, and law and justice ministries, the Cabinet Division, the Attorney General and all four provincial governments for input.

Why this is not a constitutional footnote

Take it out of the legal language and the question is simple: when a gas field in Sindh or Balochistan produces, who decides where the gas goes, what the wellhead price is, and how the royalty is split.

The CCI is slow, which is the federal government's stated case for taking routine matters out of it. It is also the only forum where a province can block a federal decision on a resource sitting under its own soil, which is the provinces' case for keeping it.

This matters for your bill because the same institutional chain sets gas tariffs and the ranking of who gets supply when there is not enough: domestic consumers, fertiliser plants, captive power, CNG. Pakistan's own gas output has been falling for years and the shortfall is made up with imported LNG, so the allocation decisions get sharper every winter. Almost all of that LNG arrives through the Strait of Hormuz, which is why the pricing of a domestic field is not an abstract question.

What to watch

• Whether the summary goes to the CCI itself or is pushed through the Cabinet.
• Whether OGRA's composition is actually opened up, which would be the first structural change to the regulator in years.
• Balochistan's position, because it produces gas from Sui and has the longest-running grievance about the share it receives.

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