There has been rapid growth in the purchasing of and conversion to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) vehicles. This is according to NGC/CNG president Curtis Mohammed.
In an interview with Guardian Media Ltd (GML), Mohammed said, “About three years ago, 30 cars were being converted. Right now close to 200 cars are being converted per month.”
He added: “That’s not counting the 50 or 60 cars that are being purchased as brand new cars and trucks and vehicles and buses in T&T.”
Mohammed explained that CNG was always in the country but in order for people to value the product, the pricing of fuel “needed to get real.” He said: “It needed to become where it has to be naturally for certain things to work.”
He said, “I mean we are talking about a differential in the pricing of about $4 between the fuels. So people are motivated now.”
Mohammed also spoke of the launch of NGC/ CNG’s pilot project in collaboration with WiPay. He said: “At some point in time, while we were doing the CNG programme, we recognised there was a need to have cashless payments platforms. Why?”
Mohammed noted that many small transactions would occur over a one day period with the purchase of CNG fuel. He said if this continued it meant that stations would collect a lot of small transactions over the night.
He argued that “it doesn’t make sense to be swiping your Visa card or your Linx card” for $5 of $15 dollar transactions.
Station operators, said Mohammed, wanted an easy way to operate this transaction.
Mohammed expressed that “right now we are testing and so far it is going very well.” The pilot project said Mohammed is going for about two months generally so by January, a decision would be made.
Mohammed said: “If it works well, then we’d roll it out to all the other stations. It’s really not that hard to roll out.”
Also speaking to GML was Aldwyn Wayne, who said that the pilot project allows a user of CNG NGC to load money into a reloadable account at the beginning of the month or week to tap and pay for gas.
He said that this is “so they have to walk around with small change like $5 and $20 to top up a gas tank. “