The agree­ment of the sale and planned start-up of op­er­a­tions of the long-dor­mant for­mer steel plant at Point Lisas, un­cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly aban­doned and left be­hind by Arcelor­Mit­tal, seems al­most too good to be true.

Cit­i­zens will re­mem­ber that in the midst of an over­crowd­ed mar­ket for steel, the ma­jor fea­tures of it be­ing low prices, un­com­pet­i­tive lo­cal pro­duc­tion and re­strict­ed mar­kets in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, the In­di­an-owned and Cana­da-based com­pa­ny shut down its op­er­a­tions and left the di­nosaur-like plant be­hind, moth­balled and for­lorn.

Sev­en years lat­er, the an­nounced planned start-up of the plant by the TT Iron Steel Com­pa­ny Ltd., with an in­ten­tion to pro­duce steel prod­ucts for the world mar­ket by the end of 2024, must be con­sid­ered good news.

Planned re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion ex­pen­di­ture of US$250 mil­lion (TT$1 bil­lion-plus), tem­po­rary em­ploy­ment of 1,000 work­ers with per­ma­nent jobs for 500 per­sons, and the drift to­wards the in­tend­ed ap­pli­ca­tion of green hy­dro­gen, a syn­thet­ic form of en­er­gy that can re­duce T&T’s con­tri­bu­tion to the re­lease of de­struc­tive gas­es in­to the at­mos­phere, are all po­ten­tial plusses.

What must have in­flu­enced pur­chase of the com­pa­ny is the 2.2 per cent fore­cast of growth in de­mand for steel in 2023 by the World Steel As­so­ci­a­tion.

But the most long-term ben­e­fit pos­si­ble is the in­tend­ed con­tri­bu­tion steel pro­duc­tion can make to­wards di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my via down­stream fab­ri­ca­tion and man­u­fac­tur­ing.

If and when all of these plans be­come ma­te­r­i­al, Trinidad and To­ba­go is ex­pect­ed to re-en­ter this in­dus­try, which was at the core of es­tab­lish­ing the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate 45 years ago. An im­por­tant note in pass­ing is that heavy in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion, start­ing with steel, was the im­pulse that drove the South Cham­ber of far-sight­ed en­tre­pre­neurs to con­ceive of the es­tate. An­tic­i­pat­ing the po­ten­tial of the es­tate to trans­form the agri­cul­ture-based econ­o­my, then his­to­ri­an prime min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams, and his team of tech­nocrats head­ed by Pro­fes­sor Ken Julien, plunged in­to de­vel­op­ing Point Lisas, the in­ten­tion be­ing to con­struct a mod­ern econ­o­my.

There is no track record of the new­ly formed TT Iron Steel Com­pa­ny; it is a mea­sure of com­fort. though. that founder/pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny, Gus Hiller, once led Nu­cor. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, chair­man Joel “Mon­ty” Pem­ber­ton is a na­tion­al who has done cre­ative work in the in­dus­try. For cer­tain though, is the need for ad­di­tion­al in­for­ma­tion about the com­pa­ny’s share­hold­ers and di­rec­tors.

It goes al­most with­out say­ing that many chal­lenges, tech­no­log­i­cal, ad­min­is­tra­tive and hu­man re­source ac­qui­si­tion and man­age­ment, a vi­able in­dus­tri­al labour agree­ment, the sourc­ing of raw ma­te­ri­als, the mar­ket­ing of prod­ucts, lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and more are ahead.

Soo too, TT Iron Steel Com­pa­ny will have to es­tab­lish pos­i­tive re­la­tion­ships with the peo­ple and or­gan­i­sa­tions of towns and vil­lages in Cen­tral and South Trinidad, its so-called “fence line” com­mu­ni­ty; more­over, with the rest of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

These last-men­tioned chal­lenges are ones which go be­yond the pur­chase of the com­pa­ny, the restart of op­er­a­tions, pro­duc­tion, mar­ket­ing and sale of prod­ucts, but are de­cid­ed­ly crit­i­cal to the suc­cess­ful restart of this his­toric ven­ture of Trinidad and To­ba­go in­to mod­ern eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

Frankly, it is not an over­state­ment to say that the coun­try is get­ting an­oth­er shot at mod­erni­sa­tion with the ad­di­tion­al chal­lenge of mak­ing “green” the in­dus­try.