“There are worse places in the world to be in December than Trinidad,” thought Ed Dowling, as he spotted the first white beaches from his seat of the Miami-Trinidad flight. “Look, Steve, we are flying close by our plant this time,” he said to Steve Elmquist, pointing at a fairly significant landmark on the coastline below them (see Exhibit 1).
Ed Dowling was executive vice president for operations at Cleveland Cliffs Inc., and Steve Elmquist was the general manager of Cliffs and Associates Ltd. (CAL), jointly owned, following a recent joint venture, by Cleveland Cliffs and the German process technology company Lurgi Metallurgie GmbH. Neither of the two had spoken much since they started their journey some eight hours ago in Cleveland, Ohio, where they had presented to the board members of Cleveland Cliffs, the status of the plant that now lay just below them.
The purpose of the plant was to produce Direct Reduced Iron (DRI), a product of great importance to steel mills known as “mini-mills”. While not directly visible to the untrained observer, the plant represented a masterpiece of process engineering and technology development. It was the first commercial implementation of the Circored technology, a revolutionary approach to iron ore reduction developed by Lurgi over the previous decade.
While CAL could undoubtedly pride itself on creating a scientific breakthrough that was being discussed in the steel industry around the world, the meeting in Cleveland, from which they were returning, was as remote from a celebration as the weather here in the Caribbean was from the early winter storms in Ohio. Both Elmquist and Dowling remembered the final statement that one of the board members had made before they left for the airport: “When we decided to take a crack at Circored, we were hoping to produce at a cost of $90 per ton and sell at a market price of $130 per ton.