Af­ter one week of voic­ing their dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the state of the in­dus­try, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan has agreed to meet with the Pe­tro­le­um Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (PDA) with­in two to three weeks.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, Khan said there will be a meet­ing.

“I promised them I will meet with them, they just have to give me by next week and I’ll for­mer­ly com­mu­ni­cate with them in that re­gard,” Khan said.

Khan ad­mit­ted there “is some ve­rac­i­ty to their case,” when asked about the re­cent com­plaints by the PDA and the Unit­ed In­de­pen­dent Pe­tro­le­um Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd (Unipet).

Top of the list of the con­cerns by deal­ers has been what they de­scribe as the un­prof­itable mar­gins, Khan the Min­istry of En­er­gy is look­ing at those claims very close­ly through the use of “sci­en­tif­ic and math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ling”.

“Mar­gins seem small, but there are oth­er is­sues to con­sid­er,” he said.

How­ev­er, Khan did not want to com­ment ex­ten­sive­ly on the pe­tro­le­um deal­ers’ op­er­at­ing costs.

“I don’t want to com­ment too much on their busi­ness but the over­time is­sue is prob­a­bly re­al,” he said.

“They did, in fact, buy 10,000 bar­rels over the week­end. So I don’t see the rea­son why they didn’t dis­trib­ute to the gas sta­tions. Hav­ing said that, there is a con­cern, the gov­ern­ment is aware of it, the mar­gins range be­tween 4.5 to 5.0 per cent. But, on the face of it, that may look small but there are oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions put in­to the equa­tion,” Khan said.

He said that when there are small mar­gins a busi­ness de­pends on vol­ume.

Khan said that the large gas sta­tion will not have much of a chal­lenge be­cause of the vol­ume of cus­tomers ser­vices and al­so be­cause of the whole con­cept of Quik Shoppes.

How­ev­er he said rur­al gas sta­tion may en­counter chal­lenges.

Al­though stake­hold­ers in the in­dus­try have been speak­ing about the is­sue for some time, Khan said that the gov­ern­ment can­not make “a lin­ear straight for­ward de­ci­sion” any time “some en­ti­ty re­quests some­thing”.

“I think the is­sue has come to the fore now, they are mov­ing quite ag­gres­sive and that’s their right. The PDA is up­ping its tem­po and the Min­istry of En­er­gy and the Min­istry of Fi­nance, will not be in­tim­i­dat­ed, how­ev­er, we will be fair, we will be even-hand­ed and we are re­al­ly eval­u­at­ing the sit­u­a­tion,” Khan said.

“A five cents in­crease on mar­gin per litre was giv­en in 2017 and they claim that at that point in time it was in­suf­fi­cient, so prob­a­bly now is an op­por­tune time to look at it se­ri­ous­ly and we would do that. We are a fair gov­ern­ment and we un­der­stand the is­sue,” he said.

Com­ment­ing on the is­sues re­lat­ing to CNG, the min­is­ter said that he has re­ceived a re­port and the En­er­gy Min­istry is cur­rent­ly ad­dress­ing the sit­u­a­tion.

“As we speak, there’s the is­sue of the elec­tric­i­ty charges for the fill­ing of the CNG at the ser­vice sta­tions which they claim to be quite high. I have spo­ken to (Pub­lic Util­i­ties) Min­is­ter (Robert) Le Hunte to give me a re­port on that, but CNG is the most eco­nom­i­cal fu­el,” Khan said.

To the con­sumer, Khan de­scribed CNG as “a most prof­itable ven­ture.”

In terms of mar­gins on CNG he said that “it falls in­to the cat­e­go­ry of the re­view that we are do­ing.”

Khan al­so dis­missed the claims of the Used Car Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion con­cern­ing the vi­a­bil­i­ty of CNG, stat­ing that they “have their own vest­ed in­ter­est.”

Af­ter nu­mer­ous gas sta­tions were shut down on Mon­day, the PDA and Unipet said that they were not “flex­ing their mus­cles” nor was it a protest.

While on the Morn­ing Brew, Unipet CEO, Dex­ter Ri­ley said: “It was a fi­nan­cial re­al­i­ty that re­sult­ed in an in­abil­i­ty to pro­vide fu­el to our val­ued cus­tomers and is root­ed in the fact that the in­dus­try has been fi­nan­cial­ly chal­lenged by in­ad­e­quate mar­gins for many years as well as in­creased levies since four years ago.”

Mean­while, the En­er­gy Min­is­ter has re­as­sured the na­tion that the gas sup­ply will be sta­ble.

“There has al­ways been peace and there will al­ways be peace. The State has to reg­u­late the in­dus­try for ob­vi­ous rea­sons. In a reg­u­lat­ed en­vi­ron­ment the State has to be fair. We will meet as ma­ture in­di­vid­u­als and sought out this mat­ter,” Khan said.

Al­so speak­ing on the pro­gramme was NGC CNG pres­i­dent Cur­tis Mo­hammed, who ad­mit­ted that CNG did not progress in the ear­ly years as well as it should have. He al­so said that the in­vest­ment in the CNG pro­gramme was not $2 bil­lion but rather $500 mil­lion.

Mo­hammed said the in­dus­try is cur­rent­ly ex­pe­ri­enc­ing an 11 per cent growth rate per month.

At the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry, Mo­hammed said, the com­pa­ny ex­pects be­tween sev­en per cent to 10 per cent of the to­tal sales vol­ume in T&T by 2024 or 2025.