Explore
Flagship studies, sector briefs, and recurring reports, by topic.
Long-form data narratives that walk through an argument.
Recurring advisor series, from weekly reads to annual reviews.
The daily policy prescription, generated each morning.
Seven sector deep-dives: banking, trade, energy, agriculture, and more.
Ask the corpus: answers grounded in published work, with citations.
Grounding verified
Bibiyana past peak; reserve-to-production declining
The curated assessment is blunt: Bibiyana is past peak, and the national reserve-to-production ratio is declining. Bibiyana has long been the workhorse of domestic supply, so once it tips into decline the country loses its single largest cushion against import dependence. A falling reserve-to-production ratio is not a forecast of a distant problem, it is a measurement that the depletion clock is already running: each year of production removes gas that the current discovery and appraisal pace is not replacing.
This matters now because the lag between deciding to act and seeing new molecules is long. Appraisal, development drilling, and import infrastructure all take years, while the decline is continuous. If Bangladesh waits for a visible shortfall before acting, it will be managing a crisis with import spot purchases at whatever price the market sets, rather than managing a transition on its own schedule. The lead body, the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources (MoPEMR), confirmed in the GovTwin entity registry, owns this sequencing problem.
Start with what is fastest and lowest-risk: appraisal and workover drilling on known structures, and loss reduction. These slow the decline while bigger commitments are arranged. In parallel, MoPEMR and BERC should publish the merit order and the depletion dashboard, because every later decision (who gets gas, how much LNG to contract, how fast SREDA must build) depends on a shared, honest picture of supply. Term LNG negotiation and the SREDA renewable programme are the longer-lead items; launching them in year one is what unlocks an orderly bridge rather than a forced one later.
The binding constraint is fiscal and political. Term LNG and accelerated drilling both demand capital up front against a benefit that arrives later, and scarcity-reflecting tariffs are politically costly because they raise prices for connected consumers. The temptation is to defer, lean on spot imports, and let the next administration absorb the shortfall. That choice trades a manageable transition cost today for a larger, less controllable bill tomorrow. Coordination is the second constraint: with BERC, BPDB, PGCB, and SREDA all dependent on MoPEMR's call, fragmented planning will waste the lead time that still exists.
Bibiyana is past peak and the reserve-to-production ratio is falling, so the question is no longer whether domestic gas declines but whether MoPEMR manages that decline on a plan or absorbs it as a crisis. Act now on appraisal, reallocation, and a contracted import-plus-renewables bridge, because every quarter of delay converts a controllable transition into a forced one.
The figures and responsible bodies cited in this prescription are drawn from the platform's own data and the GovTwin registry listed below.
Drafted by an Opus writer grounded in the facts above. Where the prescription cites a figure, it is drawn from those facts. The diagnosis derives from the BDPolicyLab crisis taxonomy; the responsible body and budget from the GovTwin registry. Recommended actions are the think tank's policy judgment.