An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers

@guardian.co.tt

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young has pitched the idea that methanol should be con­sid­ered as an al­ter­na­tive avi­a­tion fu­el.

Young threw out the idea dur­ing his speech at the open­ing ses­sion of the CA­PA Air­line Leader Sum­mit Latin Amer­i­ca at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

He said the in­dus­try has been known as one of the high­est emit­ters of green­house gas and fol­low­ing the re­cent use of methanol to pow­er ma­rine ves­sels, it is an av­enue the in­dus­try could ex­plore to re­duce emis­sions.

“Methanol is a clean burn­ing fu­el, and the avi­a­tion in­dus­try too is look­ing at how do you clean up avi­a­tion fu­el, what are the blends you can utilise. T&T is well ad­vanced in that, and it was one of the is­sues, one fac­tor that is go­ing to prove to give us a com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage,” Young said.

He not­ed that the aim is for T&T to be­come a hub for the avi­a­tion in­dus­try and Caribbean Air­lines is will­ing to part­ner with all oth­er air­lines in routes that make sense.

“The Cab­i­net has giv­en them (CAL) the au­tho­ri­sa­tion to go ahead and ac­quire air­craft to start fly­ing routes in­to South Amer­i­ca,” he told the air­line au­di­ence.

Young called on the avi­a­tion in­dus­try to pro­vide so­lu­tions for bet­ter con­nec­tiv­i­ty.

“When I was in Venezuela for en­er­gy meet­ings, what was sup­posed to be an hour and a half flight took me nine hours to reach Cara­cas. I had to go to Pana­ma. Cara­cas is buzzing with op­por­tu­ni­ty as a re­sult of their en­er­gy sec­tor, so that is the route that should be looked at by the in­dus­try,” he said.

Al­so speak­ing was Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan, who said T&T’s host­ing of the con­fer­ence un­der­lines the coun­try’s grow­ing in­ter­est and in­vest­ment in the in­dus­try.

He be­lieves T&T is poised for growth in the sec­tor and has made strides to widen its air­line con­nec­tions around the world.

“You would have seen the min­istry sign­ing air ser­vices agree­ments in sev­er­al parts of the world in re­cent times, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates (UAE), Qatar, the Nether­lands. We are look­ing at Ghana, Nige­ria short­ly, and sev­er­al oth­er ar­eas. So, we are very se­ri­ous about the avi­a­tion in­dus­try in T&T,” Sinanan out­lined.

He stressed that while many may look to T&T as a tra­di­tion­al tourism spot, oth­er as­pects at­tract trav­ellers.

“We have a very vi­brant tourism, a very vi­brant en­er­gy sec­tor, and a very vi­brant man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor. So the air­lines who are at­tract­ed can sell their en­tire first fleet with busi­ness trav­ellers com­ing in and out of this coun­try. I can tell you that we are very se­ri­ous about the avi­a­tion in­dus­try,” he added.

Sev­er­al ex­ec­u­tives from var­i­ous air­lines spoke on var­i­ous pan­els about the out­look for air­line re­struc­tur­ing and fi­nanc­ing; merg­ers and con­sol­i­da­tion, along with mar­ket ex­its and new start-ups; fi­nanc­ing and con­straints of re­gion­al in­fra­struc­ture; do­mes­tic and in­ter­na­tion­al tourism out­look; and re­gion­al ef­forts to­wards avi­a­tion sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Many of the speak­ers said the re­gions have seen trav­el bounce back af­ter the pan­dem­ic in the way that Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean have.

How­ev­er, they said de­spite this pos­i­tive mo­men­tum for trav­el, re­gion­al prof­itabil­i­ty re­mains elu­sive and per­for­mance varies sub­stan­tial­ly from mar­ket to mar­ket.

Del­e­gates from as far as Qatar, Sau­di Ara­bia, Turkey and Ger­many have come to T&T for the sum­mit, which is be­ing held in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean.