PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

ANSA McAL Lim­it­ed is look­ing in­to in­creas­ing the re­cov­ery of green­house gas­es, in­clud­ing hy­dro­gen, from its Caribbean plants.

This was re­vealed by the com­pa­ny's Chief Le­gal and Ex­ter­nal Af­fairs Of­fi­cer Frances Bain-Cum­ber­batch at day two of the Caribbean Sus­tain­able En­er­gy Con­fer­ence at the Hilton Trinidad on Tues­day.

"For the last 25 years, Carib Brew­ery has been re­cov­er­ing (car­bon diox­ide) in Trinidad and St. Kitts. We have been re­cov­er­ing car­bon diox­ide from our man­u­fac­tur­ing process and reusing that in our man­u­fac­tur­ing of bev­er­ages. So, since we've been do­ing this for 25 years, the equip­ment and tech­nol­o­gy is not up to speed, and we've de­cid­ed, be­cause we are not re­cov­er­ing as much, that we need to go big­ger and bet­ter. And that is what re­quired in­vest­ment, which we pre­pared to make and and we'll be do­ing more of that in terms of re­cov­er­ing hy­dro­gen from our process­es at the brew­ery," said Bain-Cum­ber­batch dur­ing a pan­el dis­cus­sion of the top­ic 'De­car­bon­i­sa­tion of the hard-to-abate sec­tors in the Caribbean.'

She ex­plained the cap­ture of hy­dro­gen was en­cour­aged fol­low­ing the com­pa­ny's ac­qui­si­tion Bleachtech last No­vem­ber, which gave the group greater in­sight in­to the process.

"Hy­dro­gen is not a di­rect green­house gas, but it is con­sid­ered an in­di­rect green­house gas, and at our plants in Vir­ginia we feed, store and com­press and then we sell off hy­dro­gen to com­mer­cial clients like Wal­mart in the Unit­ed States. And we are right now ex­plor­ing projects in Trinidad be­cause we have been in the bleach busi­ness, as I said, for 40 years. ANSA Chem­i­cals is our com­pa­ny, and we will be ex­plor­ing sim­i­lar projects. In fact, we are se­ri­ous­ly ex­plor­ing with a part­ner to do a sim­i­lar ex­er­cise in Trinidad," she said.

She con­tin­ued,"It's a jour­ney we've be­gun the jour­ney as we are fo­cussed and com­mit­ted to achiev­ing our ob­jec­tives and play­ing our part in in re­duc­ing our car­bon emis­sions. This is a one as­pect of our sus­tain­abil­i­ty jour­ney, be­cause we have oth­er as­pects which deal with wa­ter con­ser­va­tion, en­er­gy re­duc­tion and more things of that na­ture."