Aleem Khan

Plan­ning Min­is­ter Dr Bhoe Tewarie yes­ter­day said Venezuela's Petro­caribe ini­tia­tive, which sup­plied oil to some coun­tries in the re­gion at dis­count­ed prices, was un­like­ly to be sus­tain­able.Speak­ing in his ca­pac­i­ty as act­ing Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs at the launch of Cari­com En­er­gy Week yes­ter­day at the Hy­att, he said: "The Venezue­lan Petro­Caribe Ini­tia­tive pro­vid­ed a par­tial and tem­po­rary so­lu­tion for this but this so­lu­tion is un­like­ly to be sus­tain­able.

"The is­sue of sub­sidised prices has been raised but in to­day's world, with every coun­try hav­ing its own chal­lenges and the glob­al sys­tem in a state of un­cer­tain­ty, that is not re­al­ly fea­si­ble."Petro­Caribe is an al­liance of main­ly Caribbean and Cen­tral Amer­i­can coun­tries with Venezuela to pur­chase crude oil at dis­count­ed and de­ferred prices.

The pay­ment sys­tem al­lows for pur­chase of oil on mar­ket val­ue for five per cent to 50 per cent up front with a grace pe­ri­od of one to two years; the re­main­der can be paid through a 17-25 year fi­nanc­ing agree­ment with one per cent in­ter­est if oil prices are above US$40 per bar­rel.

Petro­caribe mem­ber coun­tries are An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Ba­hamas, Be­lize, Cu­ba, Do­mini­ca, Grena­da, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Hon­duras, Ja­maica, Nicaragua, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, S. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vin­cent and the Grenadines, Saint Lu­cia, Suri­name and Venezuela.

Tewarie said one pos­si­ble so­lu­tion to high oil prices for small Caribbean is­lands was in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nanc­ing op­tions of­fered to pur­chase nat­ur­al gas from T&T."But the prac­ti­cal­i­ty of this is that a mu­tu­al­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry so­lu­tion will have been found in the short to medi­um term for all coun­tries, and giv­en this new com­fort lev­el, al­ter­na­tive en­er­gy so­lu­tions can be vig­or­ous­ly pur­sued there­after," he said.

He told the Caribbean del­e­gates about T&T's plan to make liqui­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) for bus­es a pri­or­i­ty, and re­it­er­at­ed promis­es made by some of his Cab­i­net col­leagues about con­struct­ing an LNG gas sta­tion on the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route."The Di­Methyl Ether (DME) so­lu­tion, pos­si­ble in about five years if all goes ac­cord­ing to plan with the Mit­subishi project, will al­so cre­ate a rel­a­tive­ly low cost, clean en­er­gy so­lu­tion for the re­gion," he said.

In April, the Mit­subishi Cor­po­ra­tion of Japan signed a project de­vel­op­ment agree­ment with Neal & Massy and the gov­ern­ment of T&T to con­struct a US$850 mil­lion plant in La Brea to con­vert nat­ur­al gas in­to DME and methanol. DME is mixed with diesel in some parts of Eu­rope and Chi­na to bring the price of that fu­el down.

"So­lar, wind, ge­ot­her­mal and even wave en­er­gy needs to be pur­sued on a col­lab­o­ra­tive ba­sis through­out the Caribbean," Tewarie said. "This col­lab­o­ra­tion should in­clude re­searchers from the re­gion but al­so re­searchers from out­side. Ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly much of the sun is ours. The wind is ours. The ocean sur­rounds us.

"Any ge­ot­her­mal re­sources that we can tap are ours. We of­fer the world an op­por­tu­ni­ty to be part of Caribbean sus­tain­abil­i­ty so­lu­tions. And what­ev­er is learnt, dis­cov­ered or cre­at­ed here will be trans­fer­able to oth­er parts of the world, so we will not on­ly cre­ate col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with oth­ers in the world but we will con­tribute ben­e­fi­cial­ly to oth­ers in the world."