Engineering Green Growth in T&T — Leading Sustainability

October 25th, 2024

The move to cleaner energy is a global priority, with many countries and companies seeking to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. While there is a significant commitment to reducing carbon emissions, many are still advancing their industrialisation policies and agendas, leading to increased emissions, while also planning to integrate new green engineering
solutions vertically.

Green Energy Transition in T&T

Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), recognised globally for its successes in transitioning from an oil economy to gas and gas-based petrochemical industries, as well as developing an indigenous energy sector workforce to enable these transitions, has to keep its eye on global structural changes to energy supply and consumption in a greening energy market.

The next 24 to 36 months remain critical in defining our green energy agenda as we seek to address significant methane leaks, capture and sequester carbon emissions, realise industrial-scale renewable energy, and enable growth in green hydrogen consumption.

All these initiatives support meeting commitments to global greenhouse gas (GHG) targets and ensuring our energy sector commodities and production levels remain stable and relevant to market demand and competition. Given our past energy transition successes, we remain poised to exploit such opportunities with local engineering and energy services providers supporting transitional green advancements with new emerging technologies from as early as 2025.

Already enabling this transition are several projects in early execution. While there are notable challenges concerning the progress and agility of our transition goals, Project Lara – a large multi-megawatt solar installation and the NewGen Hydrogen Project, a low-carbon industrial solution to increase gas feedstock and mitigate methane and carbon emissions, show some positive signs. Other significant projects include “The Roadmap for a Green Hydrogen Economy in Trinidad & Tobago” (2022) and the “Wind Resource Assessment Programme (WRAP)”.

T&T’s Path to Green Energy Leadership

The greening of the local energy sector will also require more ‘tech-heavy’ skills, with new cohorts of young, trainable professionals able to enter and exploit this transition. To achieve this, there must be collaboration among academia, industry and government to drive green engineering innovations. Two novel multi-institutional projects, comprising private sector partners, The University of the West Indies (UWI), The University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) and the Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries (MEEI), are seeking ways to develop new capacity-building programmes and offer applied research opportunities and consulting services. These are the Green Hydrogen Research Collaborative (H2RC), which is driven by Kenesjay Green Limited (KGL), and the Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage Collaborate (CCUS-C).

While it took many decades to develop our energy sector to what it is today, leaving the rapidly changing energy landscape unchecked can quickly lead to further economic vulnerability. But, leveraging our human resources and industrial asset base, combined with new green technologies, can soon catapult T&T into a new green growth industrial revolution. T&T can take the lead in not only reaping local benefits and creating new jobs and businesses but also in exporting services to enhance the Caribbean region’s energy security by diversifying energy sources and building resilient infrastructures.

By Navin Boodhai