SHAS­TRI BOODAN

This coun­try's fu­el sub­sidy was $4.4 bil­lion last year and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine says CNG is key in bring­ing about a re­duc­tion. The min­is­ter, who spoke at the open­ing of T&T's first CNG fill­ing sta­tion in 20 years, said $0.7 bil­lion of the sub­sidy was met through levies on oil com­pa­nies, leav­ing the Gov­ern­ment with a bill of $3.7 bil­lion. He said 52 per cent goes to the sub­sidi­s­a­tion of diesel, while 41 per cent goes to the sub­sidi­s­a­tion of su­per gas.

As a re­sult, Ram­nar­ine said, the Gov­ern­ment is mov­ing ahead with the open­ing of more CNG fill­ing sta­tions in a bid to ef­fect a cul­ture change away from liq­uid fu­els. He said CNG is safer, cheap­er and clean­er and one of the his­toric prob­lems with it, the fill­ing time, has been con­sid­er­ably re­duced since a tank can now be filled in un­der four min­utes.He said the min­istry has al­so in­creased its vig­i­lance in terms of reg­u­la­tion of the en­er­gy sec­tor."Short­ly, we will be tak­ing to Cab­i­net new li­cences for the re­tail and whole­sale of fu­els. In this re­gard, the Min­istry con­sult­ed with NP and Unipet."

Ram­nar­ine said CNG is used in bus fleets in Ar­genti­na and the Unit­ed States. He said the lo­cal mo­tor­ing pub­lic wants to see ser­vice sta­tions es­tab­lished be­fore they can be con­vinced to con­vert to CNG.He said the open­ing of Unipet's new $30 mil­lion fill­ing sta­tion brings to ten the to­tal num­ber of CNG sta­tions op­er­at­ing in T&T. He said an­oth­er CNG sta­tion will soon open in Tacarigua.Ram­nar­ine said for the past four months the Min­istries of En­er­gy and Fi­nance have been re­fin­ing a CNG mas­ter plan which will go be­fore Cab­i­net short­ly.The new Unipet sta­tion, the largest ser­vice sta­tion in the Caribbean, is lo­cat­ed at Brent­wood, Ch­agua­nas.

Afraz Ali, chair­man of Unipet, said the com­pa­ny es­ti­mates that 5,000 ve­hi­cles need to be con­vert­ed to CNG an­nu­al­ly in or­der for gas sta­tion own­ers to re­cov­er their in­vest­ment in dual-fu­els dis­pens­ing fa­cil­i­ties."We are aware the Gov­ern­ment has put in place a num­ber of in­cen­tives to fa­cil­i­tate this but we sub­mit that the im­pact of those in­cen­tives needs to be re­viewed," he said.Ali said the Brent­wood sta­tion pro­vides easy ac­cess to the high­way and con­tains 24 fill­ing points.He said when Unipet en­tered the mar­ket 13 years ago, ser­vice sta­tions were old and an­ti­quat­ed and in a short pe­ri­od the com­pa­ny had "catal­ysed the trans­for­ma­tion of the in­dus­try."