This coun­try has stocks of Reg­u­lar gaso­line to last un­til the end of this month and in­to De­cem­ber.

But the Gov­ern­ment is still cur­rent­ly ex­am­in­ing ways to de­ter­mine how best this type of fu­el can be im­port­ed in the small quan­ti­ties be­ing de­mand­ed, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan said yes­ter­day.

Speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia at the Gas Ex­port­ing Coun­tries Fo­rum (GECF) at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, how­ev­er, Khan rub­bished the no­tion that T&T is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a “fu­el sit­u­a­tion.”

Ad­mit­ting Reg­u­lar gaso­line re­mained a “small chal­lenge,” Khan as­sured this is be­ing worked on by the Gov­ern­ment.

“The use of Reg­u­lar gaso­line is so small we can­not get ships to bring in that amount of car­go. But we are work­ing on some way to see how we can still get Reg­u­lar gas,” Khan said.

He al­so again dis­missed re­ports that Su­per gaso­line is burn­ing out faster now that this coun­try is im­port­ing fu­el.

Khan said these com­ments be­ing made by the pub­lic were mis­in­formed, as the coun­try had not yet start­ed us­ing its im­port­ed fu­el sup­ply.

“Imag­ine peo­ple say­ing their gas is burn­ing faster and we haven’t even put the im­port­ed gas on the mar­ket as yet.

“It is nor­mal re­fin­ery gas...it is mind over mat­ter at a min­i­mum and it is mis­chief at a max­i­mum. We promised the na­tion that we would have a seam­less tran­si­tion from re­fin­ery fu­els to im­port­ed fu­els and we have no rea­son to change that po­si­tion,” Khan added.

St Croix/Bar­rack­pore Taxi Dri­vers’ As­so­ci­a­tion vice pres­i­dent Nar­ine Lochan was one of the in­di­vid­u­als who had claimed his mem­bers were com­plain­ing that Su­per gaso­line seemed to be burn­ing faster. He had said giv­en the high­er cost of Su­per and Pre­mi­um gas, us­ing Reg­u­lar fu­el had be­come a pre­ferred choice for taxi dri­vers, de­spite the car man­u­al rec­om­men­da­tion that a cer­tain oc­tane of fu­el should be used.

“Su­per is burn­ing out like wa­ter and we have to mix us­ing Reg­u­lar gas be­cause the cost is too much. We can’t get the dis­tance we cov­er with the Su­per now. What we need is for the Gov­ern­ment to sub­sidise taxi dri­vers. The gas is caus­ing hav­oc to the taxi in­dus­try,” Lochan said.

Asked to com­ment on a news­pa­per and tele­vi­sion re­port which claimed there is a gas rack­et at Petrotrin, Khan said he could not make a state­ment as he nei­ther saw the re­port nor had any knowl­edge of the al­le­ga­tions.