En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan says he does not ex­pect mo­torists to ri­ot over the im­me­di­ate $1 per litre in­crease on su­per at the pumps.

“I don’t think so. I think it was very well ex­plained,” Khan told re­porters in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day when asked if he ex­pects mo­torists to ri­ot over the price hike.

“Any­time prices go up…ob­vi­ous­ly peo­ple will re­spond in a par­tic­u­lar way…some more un­der­stand­ing than oth­ers. But I think the con­text in which it was placed in the bud­get, I think it is dif­fi­cult to say that it is not jus­ti­fied.”

Khan main­tained that the in­crease had noth­ing to do with the im­pend­ing clo­sure of Petrotrin’s re­fin­ery but to re­duce the $1.5 bil­lion sub­sidy on fu­el.

He ad­mit­ted that some pri­vate taxis who use su­per will face a chal­lenge in pay­ing more, but said there was al­ways an op­tion of con­vert­ing ve­hi­cles to CNG, which sells at $1 per litre. He said com­pa­nies have been of­fer­ing con­ces­sion­ary rates for CNG con­ver­sions and it was time we go this route, as Gov­ern­ment was mov­ing to es­tab­lish more CNG sta­tions across the coun­try.

While it would cost a mo­torist rough­ly $12,000 to con­vert their ve­hi­cle to CNG, Khan said this was fea­si­ble to taxi op­er­a­tors, who can pay back for such a con­ver­sion in six months’ time.

“If you are a fair­ly long com­muter you pay back for that in un­der a year. So that is as eco­nom­ic as you can get.”

Khan’s as­sess­ment of the bud­get was that it was “a fair­ly good bud­get.”

“We are cau­tious­ly op­ti­mistic that a turn­around is tak­ing place,” he said.

In the com­ing weeks and months, Khan said cit­i­zens will see pos­i­tive as­pects of the bud­get, es­pe­cial­ly on the en­er­gy sec­tor. He could not say when Petrotrin’s work­ers will be paid their at­trac­tive re­trench­ment pack­ages, which are cur­rent­ly be­ing worked out, but not­ed the pay­ments are high­er than in­dus­try stan­dards “by as much as 50 to 100 per cent at times.”

He ad­mit­ted that Gov­ern­ment will face some neg­a­tive fall­out from the clo­sure. Khan al­so was un­aware of the range of the pack­ages that will be of­fered to the af­fect­ed work­ers.

Asked where the mon­ey for the pay­out plan will be sourced, Khan said Gov­ern­ment will as­sist Petrotrin.

“But Petrotrin is go­ing for ma­jor re­fi­nanc­ing be­cause even the bond has to be re­fi­nanced. All that pay­ment of the two point some­thing bil­lion dol­lars will be part of the re­fi­nanc­ing process. As we speak, there are sev­er­al in­ter­na­tion­al banks...I don’t want to call their name, that are in­ter­est­ed in re­fi­nanc­ing.”