The setting of greater value-development goals for the University of the West Indies to research and create products to enter the challenging world marketplace, and to do so in collaboration with Heritage Petroleum, is a real-world objective.
“This partnership symbolises the fusion of knowledge and practice, the fusion of innovation and application as we embark on a joint mission to drive progress and prosperity in the energy sector,” Heritage CEO Erik Keskula said at the launch of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two vitally important institutions.
In turn, UWI Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the St Augustine campus, Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, noted that the new ongoing demand in the market for low carbon and cleaner products was incentive enough for the researchers and frontline producers to come together in the interest of the country.
For decades, one requirement of UWI and other tertiary-level educational institutions has been for their research and teaching to be linked closely to developing goods and services which can be used on a day-to-day basis to grow the economy and advance society. In this context, it should be noted that the T&T campus of UWI first emerged from the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, which was considered one of the best and most practical in its time. Over the decades, an Engineering Faculty at St Augustine with a post-graduate research agenda, and the Caribbean Industrial Research Institute (CARIRI) as an institution of research, science and technology to place products on the market have also emerged to meet practical needs.
As stated by the Heritage CEO at the launch of the new partnership between UWI and the country’s major foreign exchange earning corporation, “exploration, production, renewable energy integration, environmental stewardship and technology or innovation,” are behind this new partnership.
To appreciate the vital importance of such a partnership between research and real-world production, we should understand that the T&T hydrocarbon industry, which has been for many decades the largest local earner of the vital foreign exchange needed for the development and expansion of the economy, is now a mature province.
Critically too, the world has been warned by environmental scientists that mankind has to move away from environmentally polluting production to green sources of power to prevent the planet’s destruction.
It is such an environment that the partnership between UWI and Heritage, the research institution and the real-world company, must be a productive venture. The challenge in front of both institutions is to continue to find ways and means to soften the negative impact of the old industry on the environment through research, and to recognise that green forms of energy will eventually take over from the hydrocarbons of today.
What all of that requires is a serious, concentrated and informed effort to take the partnership beyond easy chat at the launch of the project for “collaborative research and development” into real-world achievement. The leaders of the two institutions must also know that long drawn-out negotiations and planning will be useless. The world outside is not sitting and deliberating, it is moving ahead with new and technology-driven products.
The longer the delay, the more difficult, even impossible, for those left behind to catch up.
