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Business View Caribbean
and the power station.”
Another important opportunity for YSL presented itself
in the early ‘90s, when Trinidad began to develop its
gas industry. In the past, the country would sell only
the oil it produced and flare off the gas. Realizing that
the gas, itself, was a sellable commodity, develop-
ment proceeded apace and construction took off. “We
started to fabricate and erect a number of methanol,
ammonia, and nitrogen plants - principally in Point Li-
sas,” says Westcott. “And for ten or fifteen years, that
was where our principal business lay. We carried on
doing commercial work; we carried on doing work up
the islands; but in terms of an order of magnitude, the
size of the structures we were doing, and the volume
of steel that we were fabricating and erecting, most of
it was going into the energy-related industries here in
Trinidad.”
Over a decade and a half, YSL rode the boom, building
some of the world’s biggest methanol plants. “We re-
ally were the only fabricator working in the energy sec-
tor for a long time, because we set ourselves up with
a quality department, an ISO quality system, certified
welders – that other companies didn’t have and that
the energy sector required of us. Westcott remembers:
“It would have been February 2006. We finished erect-
ing Atlas Methanol, which, at the time, was the world’s
largest methanol plant. In March, we walked across
the road in Point Lisas and started to fabricate and
install the structural steelwork for a plant that was big-
ger than that – the M5000 methanol plant.”
Now that the gas plants have all been built, YSL is no
longer fabricating for the country’s energy industry,
and has gone back into the commercial sector for proj-
ects. “The energy sector has died away for us, because
