Methanol and am­mo­nia pro­duc­er Pro­man and The Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) have launched the Deck Cadets Ap­pren­tice­ship Train­ing for stu­dents com­plet­ing their diplo­ma cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in Mar­itime Op­er­a­tions, Nav­i­ga­tion Pro­gramme.

Through this ini­tia­tive, UTT Deck Cadets en­rolled in prac­ti­cal train­ing for one year on-board the new Pro­man Ste­na Bulk fleet of methanol fu­elled ves­sels. To date, four Deck Cadets have com­menced as­sign­ments.

A state­ment from Pro­man said Deck Cadets Jared Odain Sama­roo and Dy­lan Williams have been as­signed to the Ste­na Pro Pa­tria while as­signed to the Ste­na Pro Ma­rine are Deck Cadets Er­ic O’Neal and Justyn Kan­tap.

“Pro­man is com­mit­ted to cre­at­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties to de­vel­op young peo­ple’s skills and ex­pand T&T’s ma­rine in­dus­try ex­per­tise. The ex­pe­ri­en­tial learn­ing de­liv­ered by the pro­gramme will po­si­tion the Deck Cadets to ac­quire the skills need­ed to nav­i­gate the mar­itime sec­tor in­to a more sus­tain­able fu­ture for ship­ping,” Pro­man said.

It not­ed the launch of the ap­pren­tice­ship pro­gramme comes at a time when Pro­man is get­ting ready to host in Trinidad the nam­ing cer­e­mo­ny for the Ste­na Pro Pa­tria, the first in Pro­man Ste­na Bulk’s fleet of six next gen­er­a­tion low-emis­sion methanol-pow­ered ves­sels.

“Pro­man is ex­treme­ly proud to be launch­ing this ex­cit­ing new Ap­pren­tice­ship Pro­gramme with UTT.

Our Deck Cadets will have the unique ex­pe­ri­ence of join­ing Pro­man’s first methanol pow­ered state-of-the-art ves­sels, and over the com­ing months will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­vel­op their pro­fes­sion­al ex­per­tise sup­port­ing the long-term growth of T&T’s lo­cal mar­itime in­dus­try,” Claus Cron­berg­er, Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of Pro­man Trinidad added.

He not­ed this is an im­por­tant mile­stone for Pro­man com­bin­ing its com­mit­ment to de­vel­op­ing youth skills, while al­so sup­port­ing the mar­itime in­dus­try’s dri­ve to ac­cel­er­ate the tran­si­tion to a sus­tain­able and clean­er ship­ping fu­ture.

Vi­vian Ram­barath-Paras­ram, UTT’s As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor, Di­rec­tor and Head of the MTCC Caribbean, Cen­tre for Mar­itime and Ocean Stud­ies who was al­so pleased about the part­ner­ship said he looks for­ward to Pro­man play­ing a lead­ing role in pro­vid­ing al­ter­na­tive ma­rine fu­els in the re­gion there­by, fa­cil­i­tat­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion of the IMO’s strat­e­gy for re­duc­ing GHG emis­sions from ships.