WASHINGTON -- The Department of Defense spent almost $43 million to build a compressed-natural-gas station in Afghanistan that would have cost up to $500,000 anywhere else and which may no longer even be operational, a congressional watchdog reported this week.
"Even considering security costs associated with construction and operation in Afghanistan, this level of expenditure appears gratuitous and extreme," wrote John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, in SIGAR's just-released report on the Pentagon-funded station.
Sopko, who referred to the site as “the world’s most-expensive gas station,” cited figures from the International Energy Association and the Pakistani government to say it should have cost between $200,000 and $500,000 to build a compressed natural gas station, even in an underdeveloped and relatively dangerous country, according to a Huffington Post report.
The Pentagon's Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which had an $822 million budget for projects in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2014, contracted an Afghan company to build the station in 2011 to demonstrate the potential of CNG stations to investors. That contract was for $3 million, the SIGAR report noted, but the cost to build and supervise the station ended up soaring to $42.7 million by 2014, with $30 million going to overhead costs, according to the task force's own assessment.
The station opened in May 2012, and the task force planned to license it to a private firm willing to build a second CNG station. An Afghan firm did take over the station in May 2014, but its license expired in November 2014, and neither the watchdog nor the Defense Department could confirm that it is still operating, the inspector general said.
The report blasts the Pentagon for claiming that it can no longer answer questions about the task force that financed the station's construction.
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