Nadaleen Singh

To stim­u­late de­mand for com­pressed nat­ur­al gas ve­hi­cles, NGC CNG Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed has set a tar­get of No­vem­ber 1 for in­creased con­ver­sions to CNG as the com­pa­ny rolls out its in­te­grat­ed mar­ket­ing cam­paign.

NGC CNG pres­i­dent, Cur­tis Mo­hammed said an an­nounce­ment will be made short­ly about new CNG in­cen­tives. He was speak­ing at a sign­ing of the mem­o­ran­dum of agree­ment be­tween D Ram­per­sad and Com­pa­ny and Pri­vate School Trans­port As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (PSTATT) at Chan Ram­lal Street, Ch­agua­nas, on Wednes­day.

"We are go­ing to be mov­ing our fo­cus from the new ve­hi­cle sup­ply points–be­cause the pri­vate sec­tor could eas­i­ly han­dle that–to con­ver­sions. In T&T we have about 800,000 plus ve­hi­cles reg­is­tered. Most of those ve­hi­cles are not elec­tric, they are gaso­line and diesel and they can be con­vert­ed to CNG. That's ac­tu­al­ly where most of our tar­get would re­side and that's where it is right now," he said.

Mo­hammed, who has been pi­lot­ing the CNG ini­tia­tive since 2013, said the mar­ket was start­ed up to en­cour­age par­tic­i­pa­tion be­tween buy­ers and sell­ers of ve­hi­cles.

"The com­mer­cial seg­ment is go­ing to be im­por­tant on the new side of ve­hi­cles that we are go­ing to be tar­get­ing. What you are go­ing to see from No­vem­ber 1 is a much deep­er for­ay in­to con­ver­sions of ve­hi­cles," he said.

Avinash Ram­per­sad, gen­er­al busi­ness de­vel­op­ment man­ag­er at D Ram­per­sad and Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, said the com­pa­ny has been suc­cess­ful in de­vel­op­ing agency agree­ments with two in­ter­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers for the Yu­tong 2K6729N ful­ly CNG 25-seater and the Ruiyue 18-seater bi-fu­el. He said the 18-seater he said will be pur­chased by a mem­ber of PSTATT and arrange­ments will be made for mem­bers of the pub­lic to test dri­ve the ve­hi­cles. The 18-seater costs $285,000, while the 25-seater costs $460,000.

Ram­per­sad said the com­pa­ny's El So­cor­ro es­tab­lish­ment has in­fra­struc­ture in place to han­dle con­ver­sions.

"We have de­vel­oped a team com­pris­ing eight or nine peo­ple and we meet reg­u­lar­ly to dis­cuss all CNG as­pects of the com­pa­ny, con­ver­sions be­ing one of them. As soon as we get our EMA li­cense and Town and Coun­try ap­proval we will be ac­tive­ly go­ing af­ter that busi­ness."