‘Whole morning revolves around gas’: Pakistan’s fuel crisis enters kitchens

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Karachi, Pakistan – Farhat Qureshi had been cooking most of her life without watching the clock. Now, at 60, her mornings begin with one question: how much can she finish before the gas in her kitchen disappears once again?

The cooking gas at her Karachi home comes in short windows in the morning, afternoon and evening. If she misses a window, the cooking is delayed, food is reheated, plans are changed, and the kitchen waits.

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“I don’t think I have ever seen this happening in my whole life,” Qureshi told Al Jazeera. “My whole morning revolves around gas.”

Pakistan’s energy crisis has intensified since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, turning a recent surplus of liquefied natural gas (LNG) into a looming shortage. Pakistan’s LNG imports had already fallen from 8.2 million tonnes in 2021 to 6.1 million tonnes by late 2025.

The US-Israel war on Iran put further pressure on a system already strained by years of declining domestic production. Pakistan meets most of its daily gas needs from domestic gasfields, which have been in slow decline for years. Imported LNG, supplied mainly under long-term contracts, fills part of that gap when shipments flow normally. Almost all of Pakistan’s LNG comes from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and imported LNG powers roughly a quarter of the country’s electricity.

With the onset of the war, LNG shipments dropped drastically. Monthly cargo data from Pakistan’s Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) shows that the country received between eight and 12 LNG shipments a month in 2025 and early 2026. In March, only two shipments arrived. Over the weekend, however, a Qatari LNG tanker crossed the Strait ⁠of Hormuz on its way to Pakistan – the first such transit since the start of the war.

Pakistani households are experiencing the energy crisis differently: through the unpaid labour of women who wake up earlier, cook more quickly, rearrange meals, delay rest, and plan their entire days around the prospect of getting gas in their stoves.

The timetable has altered the manner in which Qureshi navigates her house – or life. She cooks for four people, including her husband and two children, without any help, making the gas schedule central to how she plans the day.

For her, cooking is a chore now broken into forced shifts. The gas in most Karachi households is first available between about 6am and 9:30am, for about two hours starting around noon, and again from 6pm to about 9:30pm. While it appears to be a manageable schedule, the supply is erratic, with low pressure making cooking a lengthier process.

“It is very irritating that when it is time, the gas does not come. It is tiring to live like this,” she said.

“In the evening, I want to give time to my family and home, or I have other things to do,” Qureshi said. “But the gas comes only at 6pm. So I do whatever I have to do quickly.”

According to a 2024 policy brief by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), unpaid care work in the country is done mostly by women, with day-to-day chores such as cooking and cleaning often treated as noneconomic work. It says women spend approximately three hours a day on unpaid, nonmarket work, with the longest time spent in the kitchen.

‘Not getting a proper meal’

Laiba Zahid, a 24-year-old teacher, says her days are now divided into the windows of breakfast, lunch and dinner that are defined by the gas supply.

“Our dinner time is set. We have to have early dinners,” she said. “Because after 9pm, the gas flow becomes really slow … By 8:30pm, I know that we have to make sure that the food is ready.”

When Zahid returns from work at about 2pm, she has little time before the gas goes off. She must heat her lunch immediately.

“Otherwise, the gas will go off. And then I will have to microwave my food. But that makes the food very dry,” she said. “So, it’s like I’m not getting a proper meal.”

Even tea, a small daily comfort, is now reliant upon the gas schedule. Zahid habitually drank tea in the evening. “Now tea is missing from my life,” she says.

The biggest compromise, she said, is “sleep and proper rest”.

“Definitely, my routine is getting controlled by the timings of the gas,” Zahid said; it “decides what time I have my breakfast, lunch and dinner”.

It also determines when she goes out, meets her friends or does her errands. “We can eat out,” she says, “but with a family of five, you cannot do that every week.”

The World Bank’s latest Pakistan Energy Survey found that in 2024, fewer than half of households had access to clean cooking, despite much higher access to electricity. On a national basis, 44.3 percent of households used low-emission clean fuel stoves as their main cooking fuel, 38.6 percent used piped natural gas (PNG) and 5.7 percent used liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). PNG is the most used cooking fuel in urban areas, with LPG potentially used as a backup due to its higher costs.

When home is also a workplace

The energy crisis has also altered chef Fatima Hafeez’s lunch business, which she runs out of her home. When PNG is not available, she uses an LPG cylinder.

“Sometimes I have to cancel an order because cooking on a cylinder turns out to be very expensive,” she says. “Load shedding and gas shortages have troubled me a lot.”

Hafeez says she starts her work quite early because of the gas supply timings. Sometimes, the issue is aggravated by electricity cuts.

“If there is no electricity and no gas, then we can’t use the generator either because it runs on gas,” she says. “We have installed a UPS, but it needs to be charged first. So there has to be electricity for it to work.” A UPS is a device that provides near-instantaneous emergency battery power to connected equipment when the main power source fails, allowing for continuous operation or a safe shutdown.

Cancelling orders is also risky, says Hafeez. “If you have taken an order from someone, then they shouldn’t be upset with you,” she said. “It doesn’t look good if we don’t deliver the order on time.”

For Shabana Hassan, a 47-year-old mother of three who runs a small beauty salon at home, the struggle is as much about electricity as it is about gas.

“Load shedding has become a big issue,” she said. “When there is no electricity, I prefer to make hairstyles for clients which do not require any electric tools.”

But that has affected her business. While she has solar power, it does not solve the problem. “We can’t use electric machines on solar, such as straighteners or hair curling rods,” Hassan said.

Simalah Zafar Baqai, a student at the University of Karachi, says the crisis for her is measured by the number of hours she is able to study or sleep.

“My entire routine is adjusted around two things: gas and load shedding,” said the 22-year-old psychology major.

“Throughout the day, I am asking my family, my parents, my siblings: ‘Is gas available? When will it come? When will it go?’,” she says. “We are not able to think about anything else.”

Qureshi recalls the time when there was an unending supply of gas, and cooking did not have to be planned throughout the day. She could cook for the day by early afternoon. Now, she says, “a continuous work is broken”.

“Our daily life is being affected. Our personal life is being affected,” she said. “And obviously, the hard work has increased.”