Standing three storeys above the ground at the base of the currently mothballed No. 6 blast furnace, project manager Justin Reed has the nervous energy of a skier about to embark on a black run.
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For the past six months, Mr Reed and his growing team have designed and planned for this day, visiting steelworks around the globe to find the best solution to ensure BlueScope continues to make steel in Port Kembla as the current blast furnace reaches the end of its life.
Like many of his senior colleagues at BlueScope, Mr Reed has worked his way up through the company, clocking up nearly 30 years with the steelmaker and is overseeing the largest investment BlueScope has ever made in steelmaking.
A day after formally announcing that board approval had been secured for the $1.15bn blast furnace reline at the Port Kembla steelworks, work crews were resurfacing the parking lot ready for the surge workforce of hundreds of staff and contractors to complete the time critical project.
A lifelong engineer, Mr Reed's task now is to find the 300 contractors BlueScope will need a day to deliver the project, as well as growing his own 100-person strong team by half, to complete the blast furnace reline project on time by 2026.
"We're going to need about 300 local tradespeople to come and do the actual reline for us," he said.
The company is dusting off the reline village that was used for relining the no. 5 blast furnace in 2009 to provide crib rooms and workspaces for the workers who will come in and complete the three year project.
Right now, the company is looking for mechanical tradespeople, boilermakers and electricians as the giant steel bottle is cut open and key components replaced.
The process will effectively re-start the blast furnace that was shut down in 2011. At that time, following the global financial crisis, BlueScope cut its workforce in half, slashing 1000 jobs, and the city and region that had built up around the steelworks entered one of its darkest periods.
Mr Reed acknowledged that for many of those who would work on restarting the No. 6 blast furnace, this history was still raw.
"Local contractors, they've been through some pretty tough times with us."
Today the feeling is very different. BlueScope announced a full year profit of $1.01 billion and is confident about its Australian arm with record Colorbond sales as the building boom continues.
These earnings are being ploughed back into the Port Kembla steelworks and once complete, the blast furnace will produce 2.6 million tonnes of iron a year, that will be fed into the adjacent steelmaking plant.
The project does not just involve restarting the blast furnace as it once was. Various improvements to the furnace's capacity and operations are included, as well as environmental improvements that will capture excess heat and gas to produce energy, rather than emissions, at the steelworks.
While BlueScope has pointed to these and other investments as part of its pathway to net zero emissions by 2050, it has been criticised by global steel monitoring groups for not pushing further towards green steel production methods.
However, BlueScope general manager manufacturing Dave Scott said that with the current No. 5 blast furnace reaching the end of its life in 2026, the green technology was not ready.
"There's really no alternative for us but to reline the No. 6 blast furnace."
A separate team is looking at how to introduce low carbon steelmaking at Port Kembla, and while there is provision in the relined No. 6 blast furnace for the use of renewable hydrogen, switching to entirely green steel production was deemed too risky at this point in time, both from a technological and financial basis.
"The numbers we have are very, very rubbery," Mr Reed said of the switch to direct reduction iron making, the most likely step towards green steel at Port Kembla. "They are significantly more than relining this blast furnace."
In addition, with only two blast furnaces, BlueScope does not have the luxury of rolling out pilot projects for green steel and needs an immediate solution. Perhaps most importantly, the Australian government has not yet been willing to underwrite green steel trials to the same extent as European counterparts.
This all may change, with CEO Mark Vassella noting in a briefing as part of the company's full year results that the technology was moving faster than he would have predicted two years ago, but for those like Mr Reed and Mr Scott who have spent their lifetimes in and around the blue steel coated in red dust at Port Kembla, the focus for now is ensuring the plant continues as it nears its 100th year.
"It'll cost $1.15 billion and it's a 20 year campaign," Mr Scott said. "That investment provides security for the Australian business, but it does provide flexibility as well, such that we're able to pivot when that low emissions steelmaking technology becomes available."
For now, Mr Reed said the steelmaker is turning to the local community to get this job done.
"We think the Illawarra community is capable of undertaking this project."
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