This coun­try’s first low ex­haust tug has been added to the state-owned Na­tion­al En­er­gy Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T Ltd’s ves­sel fleet.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young joined Na­tion­al En­er­gy yes­ter­day to of­fi­cial­ly wel­come Na­tion­al En­er­gy Re­silience.

A ves­sel com­mis­sion­ing cer­e­mo­ny was held at the Hy­att Re­gency and was at­tend­ed by stake­hold­ers from the mar­itime and en­er­gy sec­tors.

The new 60-tonne bol­lard-pull tug is be­ing hailed as the “clean­est” tug op­er­at­ing in T&T, and at this time, the sec­ond in the re­gion.

Na­tion­al En­er­gy chair­man, Dr Joseph Khan, stat­ed that the: “Na­tion­al En­er­gy Re­silience is dif­fer­ent from any oth­er tug in our fleet. It is In­ter­na­tion­al Ma­rine Or­gan­i­sa­tion (IMO) Tier III-cer­ti­fied. This stan­dard was de­signed to im­prove air qual­i­ty and pro­tect pub­lic health by con­trol­ling emis­sions from ships and ves­sels. We are there­fore de­light­ed to say that the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Re­silience us­es tech­nolo­gies that re­duce its ni­trous ox­ide emis­sions by 80 per cent. This is a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in emis­sions of a green­house gas that is 300 times more po­tent than car­bon diox­ide.”

He end­ed his re­marks stat­ing that Na­tion­al En­er­gy’s de­ci­sion to ad­here to the IMO-Tier III stan­dard was com­plete­ly vol­un­tary.

In de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress, Min­is­ter Young stat­ed: “While I reg­u­lar­ly, and open­ly, re­peat the im­por­tance of nat­ur­al gas in the en­er­gy tran­si­tion, I want to re­as­sure the peo­ple of T&T, that this Gov­ern­ment, is al­so ful­ly com­mit­ted to cli­mate ac­tion through the re­duc­tion of our coun­try’s green­house gas emis­sions.”

Young stat­ed that “as a coun­try, we are no strangers to be­ing first movers, par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the en­er­gy sec­tor and there­fore com­mend­ed Na­tion­al En­er­gy for con­tin­u­ing to im­ple­ment its man­date of de­vel­op­ing and fa­cil­i­tat­ing sus­tain­able en­er­gy in­dus­tries” through the im­ple­men­ta­tion of sev­er­al ini­tia­tives that sup­port the gov­ern­ment’s ef­forts to de­car­bon­is­ing the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor.

The Na­tion­al En­er­gy Re­silience has se­cured all doc­u­men­ta­tion re­quired to op­er­ate and is now avail­able for im­me­di­ate hire.