Prime Minister Patrick Manning yesterday revealed that this country was considering using the ’controversial’ technology of capturing and storing of carbon emissions, as a means of doing its part to reduce global warming.

The release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a major contributor to climate change.

Asked whether Trinidad and Tobago would be accessing or supplying financial aid (from the fund to be established) for small vulnerable nations to deal with climatic change, Manning said Trinidad and Tobago fell in the category of small and vulnerable developing countries.

’True we aspire to developed country status by 2020, but we are not there yet and we are still considered developing. But Trinidad and Tobago is an industrialised country and therefore you would find that our carbon footprint is a little larger than the footprint of countries which are considered to be developing,’ Manning said during a press conference marking the end of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Port of Spain.

’In those circumstances we will...pursue a policy of minimising our carbon emissions and the emissions of other greenhouse gases and we will seek to retrofit (modernise the technology of) existing plants in collaboration with companies that operate here in the industry.’

He said Government would seek to achieve this in the shortest possible time.

’One of the mechanisms we are contemplating to reduce our carbon footprint is the question of carbon capture and sequestration, which is something that is very contentious because there are countries that believe that if you place carbon oxides in formations that once contained oil and gas, you run the risk of leakages from these horizons,’ Manning said.

’While that is quite possible, we do not see it as the problem that some others see it, and therefore we are contemplating it. In fact, in Trinidad and Tobago, we have been doing some of that for some time, because carbon dioxide is the commodity that we use in the secondary recovery of oil.’

He added that some of the plants used to manufacture ammonia have carbon dioxide as a by-product. He said on the other hand, the methanol plants use carbon dioxide to increase its outproduct, ’so it is a kind of trade off situation; a net situation in which we have an excess of carbon dioxide produced over carbon dioxide consumed and it is in those circumstances we are considering carbon sequestration’.

The Prime Minister said the Government did not see it as a prohibitively expensive proposition. He said climate change was not an academic issue.

’We just have to do what we have to do to keep the level of concentration of greenhouse gases in the air as low as possible,’ he said.

Asked what will make the Climatic Change Fund a reality allowing developed countries to access it, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, also at the conference, said his finance people told him that his country’s contribution would be $10 to $15 million to the $10 billion fund for climate change. He said one of the key issues was forming a global alliance in which technology would be given to developed countries to assist them to develop in an environmentally friendly way. -Ria Taitt