Sascha Wil­son

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan says the Gov­ern­ment's aim is to in­crease the num­ber of ve­hi­cles us­ing Com­pressed Na­tion­al Gas (CNG) to 100,000 in the next five years. Re­veal­ing this at the open­ing of an up­grad­ed Unipet R Su­per­sad Ser­vice Sta­tion at Mara­bel­la, on Tues­day, Seep­er­sad-Bachan re­it­er­at­ed that it was not the Gov­ern­ment's in­ten­tion to raise the prices of fu­el but to put an al­ter­na­tive in place. The min­is­ter said the most im­por­tant step in en­cour­ag­ing mo­torists to con­vert to CNG was the pro­vi­sion of an ad­e­quate and con­ve­nient net­work of ser­vice sta­tions. "This would re­quire con­struc­tion of five new ser­vice sta­tions over an 18-month pe­ri­od and the es­tab­lish­ment, by 2015, of a net­work of at least 64 CNG sites through­out the coun­try."

She said her min­istry had agreed to grant li­cences for the con­struc­tion of those ser­vice sta­tions and had re­quest­ed of both Unipet and NP to sub­mit po­ten­tial sites for con­struc­tion. "While a de­ci­sion is yet to be made on the lo­ca­tion of the new CNG sta­tions, I want to tell you that the Gov­ern­ment's ap­proach has been such that it will not be us­ing state funds to con­struct these new sta­tions. Rather, we have en­cour­aged the play­ers in the mar­ket place to in­vest their own funds and to dri­ve this ini­tia­tive for­ward as a pri­vate sec­tor ori­ent­ed, ser­vice-dri­ven, cus­tomer-fo­cused and de­liv­er­able project," she said.

In re­view­ing the cost of up­grad­ing fu­el sta­tions, she said the Gov­ern­ment re­alised it was cost­ing the State twice the amount to up­grade its ser­vice sta­tion with far more time be­ing tak­en to do the up­grade when com­pared with a Unipet ser­vice sta­tion. She said the rea­son to pro­mote CNG as an al­ter­na­tive choice was as much eco­nom­ic as it was so­cial and en­vi­ron­men­tal. The min­is­ter said last year alone the Gov­ern­ment sub­sidy cost was $2.6 bil­lion. She said this was a waste of valu­able tax mon­ey since the in­fra­struc­ture and pi­o­neer­ing work was al­ready in place. She gave the com­mit­ment that the Gov­ern­ment would as­sist Unipet in putting the in­fra­struc­ture in place to of­fer CNG at its Mara­bel­la sta­tion.