ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has secured approval for a long-sought white oil pipeline running nearly 435 kilometers from Machike, near Lahore, to Tarru Jabba, near Peshawar, the missing link in a fuel supply chain that once complete will stretch unbroken from Karachi to the country’s northwest for the first time.
The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) facilitated the final approval of the Machike-Thallian-Tarru Jabba White Oil Pipeline, capping more than a year of negotiations and groundwork that began in February 2024. That month, Pakistan State Oil, the Frontier Works Organisation and Interstate Gas Systems signed a memorandum of understanding at the SIFC Secretariat in the Prime Minister’s Office, formally launching the consortium behind the project.
A full consortium agreement followed in September 2024, witnessed by the federal minister for petroleum and senior SIFC officials.
The pipeline runs in two segments -- Machike to Thallian and Thallian to Tarru Jabba -- along the motorway, with connectivity options to the Attock refinery, Chakpirana and Faqirabad. It will carry an initial capacity of seven million tons per annum, expandable to 10 million tons. For decades, the country has relied heavily on a costly and loss-prone network of tanker trucks to move refined petroleum products northward, a system plagued by road congestion, fuel adulteration and transit losses. The new pipeline aims to address all three, while completing the oil pipeline backbone from Karachi to Peshawar. The project is spearheaded by the Frontier Works Organisation and jointly supported by Pakistan State Oil, PARCO and Interstate Gas Systems.
