Sean Nero

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine has praised the ANSA McAL Group, par­ent com­pa­ny of Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed, for con­tribut­ing to the coun­try's eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.The min­is­ter spoke at Tues­day's launch of lux­u­ry com­pressed nat­ur­al gas ve­hi­cles by Clas­sic Mo­tors at its Port-of-Spain show­room. Clas­sic Mo­tors, a di­vi­sion of Ansa Au­to­mo­tive, un­veiled its CNG lux­u­ry ve­hi­cles–the Hon­da City CNG and the Hon­da HR-V–fea­tur­ing bi-fu­el sys­tems for CNG and reg­u­lar fu­el.

"Our coun­try has to evolve in­to what we call a low car­bon econ­o­my. That's the way that the en­tire de­vel­oped world is head­ing, to­wards low car­bon sources of fu­el: re­new­able en­er­gy and things like CNG."And, I am al­so hap­py to hear that Hon­da has do­nat­ed a ve­hi­cle to the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Com­pa­ny, which the stu­dents will use as a teach­ing de­vice so that fu­ture tech­ni­cians will un­der­stand how to re­pair CNG ve­hi­cles," Ram­nar­ine said.

Now that there are CNG ve­hi­cles ready for the road, the min­is­ter em­pha­sised, suf­fi­cient fill­ing sta­tions are be­ing opened to meet con­sumer de­mand.At present there were 13 CNG sta­tions in Trinidad. Unipet ser­vice sta­tions were re­cent­ly opened in Brent­wood, Ch­agua­nas, and in Tacarigua. Ram­nar­ine said the NP ser­vice sta­tion at Massy Stores in Trinci­ty will open soon and by the third quar­ter of the year the St Christo­pher's ser­vice sta­tion on Wright­son Road will be com­plet­ed.

In ad­di­tion, up­grade work is be­ing done on the Star­lite ser­vice sta­tion in Diego Mar­tin to in­clude CNG fu­el, as well as sta­tions along the high­way in San Juan, the Churchill Roo­sevelt High­way and Tumpuna Road, Ari­ma. NGC CNG had a man­date to al­so in­stall CNG kits in ex­ist­ing gas sta­tions across the coun­try.

The min­is­ter said get­ting CNG pow­ered ve­hi­cles in­to the main­stream new car mar­ket was a very im­por­tant mile­stone in this T&T's CNG jour­ney. He said at last count T&T had ap­prox­i­mate­ly 775,000 ve­hi­cles on the road. The met­rics showed there was al­most one ve­hi­cle to every per­son over the age of 17 and the av­er­age mid­dle class home now had not less than three ve­hi­cles.

"That's above 775,000 ve­hi­cles on the road us­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1.2 bil­lion litres of su­per, pre­mi­um and diesel gaso­line on an an­nu­al ba­sis. That costs the coun­try around $4.5 bil­lion dol­lars every year, if the oil price were around $100.

"For 31 years, since the days when Mr (Patrick) Man­ning was min­is­ter of pe­tro­le­um and mines, the coun­try has been try­ing to in­tro­duce CNG in­to its trans­porta­tion fu­el sys­tem. We have had some progress. It start­ed and stopped. We re­mem­ber the sto­ries of long lines at the fill­ing sta­tion in Curepe. Taxis would snake to the back of the gas sta­tion to fill up," the min­is­ter re­called.

In an at­tempt to pro­mote use of CNG, state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) es­tab­lished the NGC CNG com­pa­ny. At present, ten per cent of fleet of the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) op­er­ate on CNG and with Clas­sic Mo­tors is one of two new car deal­ers of­fer­ing CNG ve­hi­cles for sale.

The $2 bil­lion CNG ini­tia­tive be­ing spear­head­ed by NGC CNG is ex­pect­ed to re­duce the coun­try's fu­el sub­sidy and in­crease ex­ports of fu­els, with the en­vi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fit of re­duc­ing green­house gas emis­sions by 360,000 met­ric tonnes per year. The plan is for the open­ing of 35 CNG sta­tions and for al­most 100,000 CNG pow­ered ve­hi­cles to be on the road at the end of the project.CNG is the low­est cost fu­el al­ter­na­tive avail­able on the lo­cal mar­ket. It costs 81 per cent less than pre­mi­um, 60 per cent low­er than su­per and 29 per cent low­er than diesel.

–with ad­di­tion­al re­port­ing by Suzanne Shep­pard