With T&T’s en­er­gy sec­tor brac­ing for the im­pact of the Eu­ro­pean Union’s Car­bon Bor­der Ad­just­ment Mech­a­nism (CBAM) in ear­ly 2026, one EU of­fi­cial says there’s still rea­son for op­ti­mism and po­ten­tial for trans­for­ma­tion.

CBAM is a pol­i­cy de­signed to tax the car­bon emit­ted dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of cer­tain goods im­port­ed in­to the EU, with the goal of cut­ting emis­sions and pre­vent­ing car­bon leak­age by in­cen­tivis­ing clean­er pro­duc­tion meth­ods glob­al­ly.

As one of the world’s largest ex­porters of am­mo­nia, T&T is ex­pect­ed to feel the ef­fects of CBAM di­rect­ly. In 2024, the coun­try pro­duced more than four mil­lion tonnes of am­mo­nia, near­ly all of which was ex­port­ed with 21 per cent sold to the EU and UK.

Amidst grow­ing con­cerns, Ivan Ovan­do-Lacroux, in­ter­na­tion­al co­op­er­a­tion of­fi­cer for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean at the EU’s Di­rec­torate-Gen­er­al for In­ter­na­tion­al Part­ner­ships, told Guardian Me­dia that the EU and T&T have reached an ad­vanced stage in a joint wind en­er­gy ex­plo­ration project. The ini­tia­tive aims to re­pur­pose ex­ist­ing off­shore plat­forms be­tween Trinidad and Venezuela to host wind tur­bines.

Ovan­do-Lacroux dis­closed that a work­shop is sched­uled for Ju­ly 23 to de­vel­op a con­crete ac­tion plan for im­ple­men­ta­tion, with ex­pec­ta­tions that tur­bines could be in­stalled by 2027.

He said the use of wind en­er­gy in am­mo­nia pro­duc­tion could sig­nif­i­cant­ly help T&T meet CBAM com­pli­ance, re­duc­ing the risk of cost­ly bor­der tax­es on ex­ports to the EU.

But not every­one is con­vinced. En­er­gy strat­e­gy and pol­i­cy ad­vi­sor An­tho­ny Paul is urg­ing the coun­try to take a more crit­i­cal look at the EU-sup­port­ed plan. He ar­gues that wind pow­er may not be the right fit for T&T, ei­ther eco­nom­i­cal­ly, ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly, or de­vel­op­men­tal­ly.

“Why are the Eu­ro­pean Union and the Amer­i­cans push­ing us to bio­fu­els? Be­cause they want to sell us so­lar and wind? They strug­gle, even with all the wind they have, to get con­sis­tent pow­er from wind,” he said.

Paul ques­tioned whether the pro­posed tech­nolo­gies gen­uine­ly re­flect T&T’s na­tion­al in­ter­ests, or whether they serve ex­ter­nal agen­das un­der the guise of clean en­er­gy part­ner­ships. He em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of in­vest­ing in home­grown, cli­mate-ap­pro­pri­ate re­new­able tech­nolo­gies that cre­ate re­al em­ploy­ment and long-term de­vel­op­ment.

“Now, bio­fu­els, biodiesel and bioethanol can go di­rect­ly in­to your car or your truck or your gen­er­a­tors. They can use the same pumps they have, the same tank wag­ons, the same re­fin­ery, in fact, right? So, we can ac­tu­al­ly use in­stalled in­fra­struc­ture. And if we do biotech­nol­o­gy re­search, bio­fu­els re­search, we can have a big im­pact on agri­cul­ture. Wind and so­lar don’t give us a lot of high-lev­el jobs, you know,” he warned.

Mean­while, cli­mate change ex­pert Steve Max­i­may is urg­ing the Gov­ern­ment to fo­cus on cli­mate jus­tice and skilled ne­go­ti­a­tion. He al­so not­ed that the tran­si­tion should be fair and strate­gic.

“It is about un­der­stand­ing prin­ci­ples like just tran­si­tion. In oth­er words, we are be­ing forced to tran­si­tion how we pro­duce all kinds of things, in­clud­ing things in the en­er­gy sec­tor. And I’m say­ing that if you have some­body with enough cli­mate jus­tice and ex­per­tise on your team, you can ne­go­ti­ate those tax­es down­wards sig­nif­i­cant­ly.”

As de­bate around the project grows, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has not re­spond­ed to mul­ti­ple re­quests for com­ment.