Richard Lord

Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning says T&T has agreed to re­duce vol­un­tar­i­ly car­bon emis­sions in this coun­try. Man­ning, Chair of the Com­mon­wealth, made this dis­clo­sure dur­ing the fi­nal news con­fer­ence at the Com­mon­wealth Heads of Gov­ern­ment Meet­ing (CHOGM) at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day. Man­ning said he didn't think some peo­ple un­der­stood the sig­nif­i­cance of deal­ing ef­fec­tive­ly with the is­sue of cli­mate change. "This ques­tion of cli­mate change is not an aca­d­e­m­ic is­sue, and it is not a mat­ter for sen­ti­ment. We just have to do what we have to do to keep the lev­el of green­house gas­es low as pos­si­ble and to re­duce it in the short­est pos­si­ble time.

We will pur­sue a pol­i­cy of min­imis­ing our car­bon ox­ides emis­sions and the emis­sions of oth­er green­house gas­es, and we will seek to retro­fit ex­ist­ing plants in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the com­pa­nies that op­er­ate here in the in­dus­try. That ob­jec­tive would be un­der­tak­en in the short­est pos­si­ble time. Man­ning said one of the mech­a­nisms be­ing con­sid­ered by his Gov­ern­ment to re­duce the coun­try's car­bon foot­print was car­bon cap­ture and se­ques­tra­tion. He ad­mit­ted that such a mech­a­nism was very con­tentious in the world, be­cause some peo­ple be­lieved it could lead to cer­tain risks.

"There are coun­tries which be­lieve that if you place car­bon ox­ides in for­ma­tions that once con­tained oil and or gas, you run the risk of leak­age from these hori­zons. While that is al­ways pos­si­ble, we do not see it, quite frankly, as the prob­lem that some oth­ers see it to be, and there­fore we are con­tem­plat­ing it." Man­ning said such a mea­sure was al­ready be­ing done in T&T. "Car­bon diox­ide is a com­mod­i­ty that we use in the sec­ondary re­cov­ery of oil, so we have been do­ing that for quite some time. It is just the scale that will be dif­fer­ent."

Man­ning said the plants that man­u­fac­tured am­mo­nia in T&T al­so pro­duced car­bon diox­ide as a by-prod­uct, and the methanol plants used car­bon diox­ide to in­crease their out­put. "So it is a kind of trade-off sit­u­a­tion, a net sit­u­a­tion in which we have an ex­cess of car­bon diox­ide pro­duced over car­bon diox­ide con­sumed, and it is in those cir­cum­stances we are con­sid­er­ing car­bon cap­tive se­ques­tra­tion," Man­ning ex­plained. He said if that was one of the op­tions avail­able to T&T, "then we're go­ing to have to use that, and we do not see it as a pro­hib­i­tive­ly ex­pen­sive propo­si­tion."