Finding a Niche

20th July 2026

Along with the announcement about the two potential data centres that has generated so much media attention was an announcement about restarting the steel plant in Point Lisas and the production of vanadium.   This has received a lot less attention, but I am very intrigued by the project.  To be totally honest, I know very little about vanadium (and I doubt I am alone in that) but I have been doing a bit of reading up about the metal over the past few days.

Vanadium is a mineral with vital strategic uses, including in military hardware and oilfield equipment, especially as an alloy to strengthen steel.  It is also used in batteries, central for the development of renewable energy systems.  

The major existing producing countries for vanadium are Russia, China and South Africa.  The United States government has identified vanadium as a critical mineral and is developing policies to secure supply chains.   One of the possible sources for vanadium is waste piles or stores from existing industry, especially refinery waste, steel slag heaps and spent catalysts, where the vanadium was present in the ores or crude oils or other raw materials prior to refining or smelting.  From what I have read, newer technologies can recover vanadium from these waste stores or tips, rather than mining the original deposits. 

My assumption is that Trinidad could be a good potential source of recovered vanadium from the old steel plant slag dumps and from refinery or crude residues in the bottom of tanks across the island.  As this is a critical mineral and given our geopolitical alignment with the USA, there may be US financing or even grants available to help recover this critical mineral.  This could be an excellent boost to help the economics of restarting the steel works, which I am sure are challenging in the current Trinidad gas pricing environment.

This also got me thinking about the data centre proposals. 

As I wrote previously, my big concern about the two planned data centres is that they will consume significant volumes of natural gas to fuel their electricity needs, either through the existing grid or more likely with dedicated generation capacity.  Solar could reduce that demand for gas to an extent, but only probably by about 20%.  That gas must come from somewhere and that would mean shutting down more petrochemical plants or diverting gas from LNG (yes production is set to increase in 2028, but not to levels to meet existing potential demand).

There are however some small sources of natural gas in Trinidad that are currently being wasted, namely the natural gas that is currently being vented from mature oil wells.  These are mainly operated by Heritage and small lease operator companies onshore Trinidad.   In 2025, Heritage signed up to the global industry targets to reduce their methane emissions, and the company has been putting in place the systems to monitor and reduce their emissions.  

Would it be possible to capture vented natural gas (methane) and use that gas to power small modular generation sets linked to small data centres?  As the natural gas is now a waste product being vented to the atmosphere could the economics be made to work? 

There has been a lot of technology developed over the past decade for small modular gas processing facilities and power generation systems, which would make projects like this more feasible.  These mature oil wells also produce a lot of water that can be separated, treated and potentially used in cooling as well.

To be clear, the volumes of gas available are significantly less than what would be needed to power major AI data centres.

However, this vented gas could by some estimates be as much as 9.0 mmsc/d. This could collectively support something like 35-40 MW of generation capacity, though the distributed nature of the potential gas supply might mean that you would need multiple smaller generators (which reduces efficiency). 

This is obviously not a solution that will replace the needs of the large AI data centres, requiring hundreds of MW of generation capacity, but it might be an interesting niche to explore.  As the use of this currently vented gas would count as a “carbon reduction” project they might be eligible for climate financing, which could help with project economics.   

There was a lot of work done on the use of this vented gas by TOSL Engineering on behalf of Petrotrin more than a decade ago.  Perhaps it is time to dust off those studies and see if this is another waste stream that can generate revenue for Trinidad & Tobago.