Resh­ma Ra­goonath

Sav­ings from Gov­ern­ment's thrust to­wards CNG (com­pressed nat­ur­al gas) con­ver­sion may on­ly be re­alised af­ter five years, Frank Look Kin, ad­vi­sor to En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kelvin Ram­nar­ine, said yes­ter­day. He ad­mit­ted that the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) is tak­ing a big risk to fi­nance con­struc­tion of 22 CNG sta­tions to get mo­torists to con­vert their ve­hi­cles to the clean­er fu­el.

"We need the vol­ume from a large num­ber of ve­hi­cles to get the load that will jus­ti­fy a net­work of sta­tions. If we do not have that load the sta­tions will suf­fer bad­ly and there­fore NGC is tak­ing a big risk al­so putting out mon­ey for the sta­tions," Look Kin said in his con­tri­bu­tion to En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T's post-bud­get break­fast meet­ing at Cara Suites Ho­tel, Clax­ton Bay.In his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Mon­day, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai an­nounced that NGC had agreed to spend $500 mil­lion on con­struc­tion of the new CNG sta­tions.

Look Kin said the mon­ey will on­ly flow in slow­ly in the be­gin­ning of the CNG ini­tia­tive and NGC will not be mak­ing mon­ey un­til a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of ve­hi­cles are con­vert­ed to CNG."The prob­lem is we have to wait about five years or more, when you have suf­fi­cient num­bers of ve­hi­cle to get the eco­nom­ic growth prop­er­ly. But I think NGC recog­nised that the main ben­e­fi­cia­ry in this is not NGC them­selves but their share­hold­ers, the Gov­ern­ment of T&T," he said.

Look Kin said Gov­ern­ment is putting out $4.3 bil­lion in sub­sidy for do­mes­tic fu­el and "if af­ter five years you are able to con­vert 100,000 ve­hi­cles (Gov­ern­ment) will be able to save $3 bil­lion.""It is a plus be­cause the coun­try saves," he said but point­ed out that for the CNG con­ver­sion to suc­ceed mo­torists have to be con­vinced to put out the ex­tra mon­ey.Look Kin said 10 to 15 con­vert­ers or more may be need­ed to try to con­vert 17,000 to 18,000 ve­hi­cles in two years.

"If we are try­ing to get 100,000 ve­hi­cles it has to be done at some sort of mass pro­duc­tion," he added.He ex­plained that while mo­torists will have to go twice as of­ten to fill up it will cost $10 to $14 com­pared to $130 for liq­uid fu­el.Look Kin said not much mon­ey will be com­ing in the sta­tions in the ear­ly stage.

He said NGC did not leave it to chance that peo­ple might be will­ing to in­vest $6 mil­lion or $10 mil­lion to build a sta­tion and get no rev­enue com­ing in be­cause "in the ear­ly years it will be very tough be­cause it is not go­ing to have very many cus­tomers."Roger Pack­er, Pres­i­dent of En­er­gy Cham­ber, said CNG has been on the bud­get for sev­er­al years and he hoped with the $500 mil­lion be­ing in­vest­ed "we could re­al­ly make this hap­pen, fi­nal­ly."