Can T&T po­si­tion it­self to be­come a sup­ply chain provider to the ro­bot­ics in­dus­try?

Tri­ni-born en­gi­neer Christo­pher Boodoos­ingh thinks we can make for­eign ex­change by build­ing mi­cro re­form­ers to pow­er ro­bots and de­vel­op sup­ply chains for a new in­dus­try that may be worth US$200 bil­lion by 2035.

Boodoos­ingh has al­ready filed a patent ap­pli­ca­tion in Oc­to­ber 2025 (USP­TO No 63/894,439) that en­com­pass­es his “Ethanol Fu­el Cell Hy­brid Elec­tric En­gine” de­signed for ro­bots.

Ethanol has 50 times the en­er­gy den­si­ty of lithi­um bat­ter­ies used in elec­tric cars, plus ethanol isn’t tox­ic to hu­mans, mak­ing it a safe fu­el to pow­er ro­bots in the house­hold and work­place.

“If the last decade was de­fined by AI in the cloud, the next may be shaped by AI in mo­tion, ro­bots in ware­hous­es, hos­pi­tals, farms, con­struc­tion sites and dis­as­ter zones. Mar­ket fore­casts vary wide­ly, but the di­rec­tion is con­sis­tent: ro­bot­ics hard­ware is grow­ing fast, with Bar­clays Re­search, for ex­am­ple, hav­ing float­ed an “op­ti­mistic sce­nario” in which hu­manoid ro­bot­ics could be­come a $200bn mar­ket by 2035,” Boodoos­ingh said.

The en­er­gy de­mand of putting a ro­bot in every home would re­quire an over­haul of the elec­tric­i­ty in­fra­struc­ture un­less a de­sign like Boodoos­ingh’s is used.

“The an­swer is to stop treat­ing ro­bots like over­sized phones, and fu­el ro­bots like pets that con­sume ethanol. In cur­rent de­signs, the ro­bot is an ap­pli­ance: it runs on stored elec­trons.

In prac­ti­cal terms, the con­cept is not an in­ter­nal com­bus­tion en­gine at all; it is a com­pact pow­er­train that stores en­er­gy in ethanol, con­verts it on­board in­to a hy­dro­gen-rich gas us­ing a re­former, and then us­es a fu­el cell to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty, with a small bat­tery to han­dle peaks and tran­sient loads. The Ethanol Fu­el Cell En­gine will shift the par­a­digm on how ro­bots func­tion, mak­ing them more like bi­o­log­i­cal life­forms, as they would now breathe in oxy­gen and ex­haust car­bon diox­ide.”

I asked Boodoos­ingh to ex­plain what a re­former was and what in­spired him to use it in the de­sign.

“I first came to un­der­stand re­form­ers by look­ing at Point Lisas. A big part of Point Lisas’ eco­nom­ic val­ue comes from re­form­ing nat­ur­al gas in­to hy­dro­gen and syn­the­sis gas, which are the build­ing blocks for in­dus­tries like steel, am­mo­nia and methanol. In many ways, Trinidad’s eco­nom­ic en­gine al­ready be­gins with the re­former.”

I asked Boodoos­ingh to dis­cuss how T&T can be com­pet­i­tive in ro­bot­ics tech­nol­o­gy when gi­ants like Chi­na and the Unit­ed States seem dom­i­nant.

We can be com­pet­i­tive by be­ing the first to be com­pli­ant to sup­ply in­dus­tri­al ethanol to ro­bots. An­oth­er op­tion would be to har­ness the same core tech­nol­o­gy of Pt Lisas in­to a com­pact mod­ule and man­u­fac­tur­ing it here to sell in­to a new glob­al mar­ket. No one man­u­fac­tures them at scale yet. Trinidad has a lega­cy to this sys­tem that no one else can say. The “Ethanol Fu­el Cell Hy­brid Elec­tric Ro­bot En­gine” was de­signed and in­vent­ed in Trinidad, just like the steel­pan,” he said.

While the fu­el cell will con­vert ethanol in­to car­bon diox­ide, the pro­duc­tion of ethanol from sug­ar cane is a closed-loop sys­tem that takes car­bon diox­ide out of the at­mos­phere.

Dur­ing the in­ter­view, I joked with Boodoos­ingh, who was once a fes­ti­val pro­mot­er, that a Tri­ni-de­signed ro­bot would run on pun­cheon and White Oak, which al­so con­tain ethanol from sug­ar cane. Chris con­firmed that his ro­bot en­gine could in­deed run on white rum if nec­es­sary.

“The choice to use ethanol for ro­bots over all the hy­dro­car­bon op­tions was due to its safe­ty, ex­cit­ing pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty, and ex­ist­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels. The sys­tem weight was al­so a fac­tor in this de­sign, kwh for kWh, the Ethanol Fu­el Cell en­gine is sig­nif­i­cant­ly lighter than any cur­rent bat­tery. Ethanol al­lows peo­ple to use stan­dard clear spir­its like white rums in an emer­gency sit­u­a­tion. This en­gine opens ac­cess for Caribbean al­co­hol com­pa­nies like An­gos­tu­ra, Ap­ple­ton, El Do­ra­do, Mount Gay, Red Stripe and Carib to one day sup­ply the ro­bot en­er­gy mar­ket.”

We then dis­cussed giv­ing ac­cess to the IP for a lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­er in the de­vel­op­ment of the mi­cro re­form­ers for the ro­bot­ics sup­ply chain in T&T.

“Sure, I think it’s a great idea for lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers to de­vel­op the sup­ply chain for the ro­bot­ic in­dus­try, it is un­like­ly any­one in Trinidad is ac­tu­al­ly gonna do it.”

How­ev­er, he be­lieves the re­al play­ers could be the al­co­hol pro­duc­ers in the Caribbean, like An­gos­tu­ra, as they piv­ot pro­duc­tion and com­pli­ance to lead the ethanol sup­ply to the ro­bot­ic en­er­gy mar­ket.

“If ro­bots are to be­come in­fra­struc­ture, their en­er­gy mod­el be­comes in­fra­struc­ture too. And the coun­tries that sup­ply the crit­i­cal com­po­nents and en­er­gy ear­ly, cred­i­bly, and at scale stand to cap­ture decades of eco­nom­ic val­ue,” Boodoos­ingh said.

To achieve eco­nom­ic growth, earn forex and cre­ate jobs, T&T needs to po­si­tion it­self to meet fu­ture de­mand. Even if a lo­cal­ly man­u­fac­tured ro­bot­ics sup­ply chain isn’t fea­si­ble, sug­ar cane and ethanol pro­duc­tion can cre­ate bio­fu­els to meet the ris­ing de­mand for ethanol world­wide.