К 64-й годовщине независимости Тринидад и Тобаго призывают переоценить промышленный потенциал вместо фиксации на неудачах

As Trinidad and Tobago approaches the 64th anniversary of Independence, the national conversation often seems more comfortable cataloguing our failures than measuring our achievements. We currently face a number of challenges as natural gas production has fallen, parts of Point Lisas are idle, households remain on water schedules, roads are in a state of disrepair and too many public investments have failed to deliver what was promised. There is a time and place for everything so on the eve of Independence Day lets explore what an independent T&T managed to build, and how those accomplishments can help us move forward. We have shut down a lot of things inherited from the colonial days, from a train network to sugar and oil refining but we also created and developed quite a bit. We can boast of an industrial platform unusual for a country of our size and this is something we take for granted. Last week, I argued that we can no longer compete principally on cheap natural gas. Production is roughly 37 per cent below its 2015 level and the United States shale revolution has changed the economics of ammonia, urea and methanol. Some of our old industrial advantages have weakened but there are significant sources of opportunity that remain. I want to start with an irony by discussing the issue of medical tourism. T&T has positioned the idea for the better part of two decades without any real execution. By 2012, medical tourism was being explicitly discussed and a national medical tourism strategy was being developed. This happened while our public healthcare system was struggling with waiting times, staffing shortages and uneven access. I don’t recall people saying we shouldn’t pursue this venture because locals lack access to public hospital beds. In fact many saw it as helping to improve our local health care infrastructure and welcomed the initiative as an opportunity to earn foreign exchange and build a broarder ecosystem. Of course, this only works if the new industry adds capacity. If medical tourism simply pulls scarce nurses and doctors from public hospitals, it can make matters worse. The objective has to be additional investment, training and facilities, not redistribution of the same shortage. Now let’s apply these principles to current industrial initiatives as it relates to water and electricity. Data Centers A common objection to AI data centres is that they may consume large quantities of water while many citizens still experience unreliable supply. The concern is understandable but it leans towards political fearmongering because it’s something we have faced and addressed in the past. Point Lisas faced this problem decades ago. Large petrochemical plants needed reliable, high quality water and the domestic system could not safely carry the additional industrial burden. T&T did not respond by abandoning industrialisation, instead we created a dedicated supply. The contract for the Point Lisas desalination plant was awarded in 1999 and first water was delivered in 2002. The primary market for desalinated water was the Point Lisas Industrial Estate, with excess water available to supplement domestic supply. That’s over two decade ago that T&T has been there, done that. The lesson is that industrial demand need not displace household demand if the investor builds or pays for additional capacity. Depending on the cooling system, that might mean recycled water, closed loop cooling or more desalination. There is also a pricing precedent. Point Lisas industrial users pay TT$12.50 per cubic metre since 2012, compared with the ordinary metered non-domestic rate of TT$3.50 per cubic metre. Just as with medical tourism if we draw from existing resources we will create a problem. If we introduce new resources profitably it can and will benefit the wider society. Electricity should be approached in the same way. Trinidad Generation Unlimited was built around the requirements of another electricity intensive industrial project. Its 720-megawatt combined cycle plant had 240 MW allocated to the proposed Alutrint aluminium smelter and 480 MW to T&TEC. The smelter was cancelled. The generating plant with surplus capacity remains. If you consider a purpose-built plant to develop a new industry, well again – T&T has been there, done that. There are concerns about subsidies. We assume that market rates will make this country uncompetitive in the AI space. Based on available information this seems incorrect. The average US industrial electricity price in 2025 was US$0.0862 per kWh. In Virginia, the centre of the American data centre industry, regulators have created a separate tariff class for customers above 25 MW specifically to prevent infrastructure costs being shifted to ordinary customers. From 2027 those users will face long term commitments and minimum payments for transmission, distribution and generation capacity. That is a useful model. A Trinidad data centre tariff could be materially higher than our legacy industrial rate, recognise the opportunity cost of natural gas and recover the cost of new generation and network investment while still being competitive with major US locations. On principle, investors should pay for dedicated substations, incremental generation, cooling and water capacity where required. Existing households and businesses should not subsidise the project. The economics seems achievable and some of the angst may be because T&T is not used to an unsubsisd venture. The Sandals proposal is a case in point and so the public objection could be to subsidies for industrialisation rather than the business opportunity itself. Infrastructure If we are not offering subsidies then what can we offer. That is at the heart of this Independence Day discussion. T&T can offer quality infrastructure that will take years to build even in the US. AI development is running into an infrastructure bottleneck in the US. Berkeley Lab estimates that data centres could consume about 11.8 per cent of US electricity by 2030. At the end of 2025 more than 2,060 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage sat in interconnection queues. Projects that actually reached operation during 2025 had taken a median of more than five years from interconnection request to commercial operation. The US has natural gas, capital and technology. What it increasingly lacks is the ability to deliver very large blocks of electricity at the right location on the timetable AI developers want. T&T has already done this at scale. That is where existing infrastructure becomes valuable. The same argument applies to the former ArcelorMittal complex. Ibis Steel, backed by US based Pinnacle Steel and Vanadium, has begun refurbishment with an initial planned investment of US$250 million and potential total investment of US$750 million. The interesting proposition is not simply restarting steel. It is combining steelmaking with vanadium. More than 90 per cent of reported US vanadium consumption is metallurgical, principally as an alloying input for iron and steel. The United States produced no primary vanadium from ore in 2025 and remained about 41 per cent dependent on net imports. Pinnacle says its ambition is eventually to produce vanadium equivalent to roughly half of US consumption. Now examine what already surrounds the project. Point Lisas has a natural gas-based direct reduced iron and electric arc furnace steel complex, port access, electricity, pipelines, industrial land and an established engineering ecosystem. The US can build the same technology but much of ours is already there. Any business case will still have to establish precisely what steel and vanadium products are being sold, to whom, and how US tariffs and trade measures affect them. Nearshoring does not make those issues disappear but it does make T&T more strategic in this hemisphere. COVID exposed the weakness of supply chains designed entirely around the lowest unit cost. Factory shutdowns, port congestion and component shortages showed that cheap is not cheap when the product cannot arrive. Since then, companies have placed more value on resilience, shorter supply chains and proximity to customers. The IDB estimates that nearshoring could add US$78 billion annually to Latin American and Caribbean exports. T&T will not beat Mexico on geography or Central America on labour costs. Our pitch has to be different. We have a Caribbean industrial platform close to the Americas with spare or underused assets whose original capital cost has largely been incurred. We know how to desalinate water at industrial scale. We know how to build large gas-fired generating plants. We know how to move gas, handle bulk products and operate complex industrial facilities. Some of our previous investments worked exactly as intended while others did not. Sandals and the aluminium smelter never materialized, and the sugar and oil refinery and the steel plant closed. Gas production has also declined. That is our untidy history of development. But Independence should also mean having the confidence to take inventory of what we have built and find ways to capitalise on that, rather than let it sit idle and throw it away. Ian Narine is an independent financial consultant with an Independence Day message. Please send your comments to [email protected].