With a little over a month to go for peak shopping season during Ramadan, the head of Pakistan’s retail industry body is shuttling between meetings, pressing officials to relax orders that forced malls to shut by 8.30 p.m. to save energy.

More than 40% of annual retail sales occur in the 30 days of the holy month, and malls are packed between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., Tariq Mehboob, also the chief executive of Pakistani menswear franchise Royal Tag, said in a letter to the government.

“Early closure could result in job losses for 3-4 million people,” Mehboob wrote.

Fear in the retail sector highlights how a shortage of imported gas has cut power output and hit the economy in Pakistan, just as it reels from soaring inflation and a sliding currency.

Pakistan is scrambling to avoid a repeat of massive power cuts it faced last year, but industry officials and analysts say the crisis is likely to worsen this year because of a sharp drop in imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Pakistan is heavily dependent on gas for power generation, but have had to slash their imports of LNG after prices rocketed on a surge in Europe’s demand to replace Russian supplies following the Ukraine war.

Despite LNG prices having fallen from last year’s record highs, the superchilled fuel is still expensive for South Asian buyers as their currencies have weakened sharply, making it hard for them to boost LNG imports this year.

Pakistan’s woes

Pakistan relies on gas for a third of its electricity output, but is grappling with dwindling foreign exchange reserves to pay for energy imports.

Ship tracking data from Kpler shows Pakistan’s LNG imports in 2022 fell 17% from the previous year to a five-year low.

As a result, in the first 11 months of 2022, Pakistan’s gas-fired power production fell 4.4%, even as overall generation rose by 1.8% to 129 gigawatt hours (GWh), data from energy think tank Ember showed.

Total power output fell well short of generation capacity and demand due to fuel shortages, analysts and government officials said, resulting in blackouts for hours every week in the second half of last year.

A key problem is that the older oil-fired power plants are inefficient and cost more to run than gas-fired plants, Pakistan Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said.

Power production costs were 1.25% higher than they would have been had sufficient LNG been available during the year ended June 2022, Reuters calculations based on data in the energy ministry’s annual report show.

However generation costs have likely jumped further since July, as officials say peak shortages intensified last summer due to lack of LNG. Currently only two of the country’s four LNG dependent plants are running.

“Summer is going to be difficult like most summers, because we walk this thin line between affordability and availability,” Dastgir told Reuters in an interview.

LNG prices are unlikely to ease enough to help Pakistan, with analysts expecting a rebound in Chinese purchases to push prices up in 2023.