LISCO and Midrex Talk Revamp in Cairo: What a Second-Hand Plant Upgrade Would — and Would Not — Deliver

LISCO's chairman and Midrex's CEO met in Cairo on 5 November to discuss maintenance, modernisation and capacity expansion at the Misrata direct reduction complex, structured as an integrated EPC project under Midrex supervision. That is essentially the whole of the disclosed content: no capex figure, no incremental tonnage, no timetable, and — the most telling absence — no signed agreement, memorandum or board approval reported by either the Libyan press or the trade press that picked the story up.

Treating this as a project announcement would be a mistake. Treating it as noise would also be a mistake. What the meeting reveals is how LISCO intends to keep a 35-year-old gas-based ironmaking complex competitive while a much larger, rival DRI development takes shape elsewhere in the country — and how Midrex is positioning itself in a market where it no longer has a monopoly on Libyan direct reduction.

The starting position: a plant already beating nameplate

The brief reports LISCO's capacity as 1.1 Mt/y of DRI across two Midrex modules plus a third Midrex unit rated at 650 kt/y of HBI. That reconciles cleanly with both LISCO's own facility disclosures and Midrex's published module data (Module 2 at 550 kt/y; three modules, two CDRI and one HBI). Total nameplate is therefore about 1.75 Mt/y.

What matters more than the rating is the performance. According to Libyan state news agency LANA, LISCO's chairman stated in January 2025 that the three DR plants produced 1.768 Mt in 2024 — above design capacity — with the HBI unit at 706 kt against a 650 kt rating.

The CDRI figure is my arithmetic (total minus reported HBI), not a disclosed number.

This changes the interpretation of "increasing production capacity" considerably. A plant running above nameplate does not have a capacity problem in the ordinary sense; an HBI unit at 109% of rating is a debottlenecking story already written. The headroom, if any, sits in the two CDRI trains at roughly 96.5%, and even there the constraint is more likely availability and operating hours than metallurgical limit — Midrex's own 2024 operations summary notes LISCO's Module 2 setting an operational-time record, which is the language of reliability, not of furnace chemistry.

So the realistic scope of a revamp is: reline and refractory work, reformer and heat-recovery upgrades, control and instrumentation modernisation, spares and maintenance regimes, and modest debottlenecking — the sort of package that lifts tonnes per operating hour rather than tonnes of installed capacity. The LISCO delegation composition supports this reading: alongside the chairman were the general manager of direct reduction, the director of DR operations, and the director of refractories and lime plant maintenance. That is a maintenance-and-process team, not a greenfield project team.

Why Midrex as EPC supervisor, and why that structure matters

An integrated EPC contract under Midrex supervision, with third parties supplying equipment and executing construction, is a recognisable commercial format: Midrex acts as technology guarantor, specifier and performance guarantor, while detailed engineering, procurement and erection are distributed. Midrex has built an aftermarket and technical-services business around exactly this — optimisation, maintenance and integrated DRI-to-EAF support.

The structure has a practical consequence for the supply chain. Equipment packages for a DR revamp — reformer tubes, refractory, heat exchangers, compressors, automation — would be tendered to third parties, and engineering houses with prior revamp experience at Misrata are plausible bidders. German engineering firm SKH, for instance, lists a "LISCO DRI Revamp" among its reference projects and advertises revamp engineering and EPCF proposal support. That is a capability claim, not evidence of an award, and readers should not read it as one.

The context that gives the meeting its weight

Three things sit behind this conversation.

Gas economics. Danieli's 2024 announcement of a separate memorandum with LISCO for a proposed 2 Mt/y EnergIron DRI plant cited the availability and competitive cost of gas in Libya as the reason LISCO invests in direct reduction. Any Libyan DRI economics rest on that premise, and a revamp of existing gas-based capacity is the cheapest way to monetise it.

A crowded Libyan DRI landscape. LISCO is no longer the only story. Tosyali SULB has awarded Midrex and SMS the first phase of a DRI complex near Benghazi — a 2.5 Mt/y MIDREX Flex plant, with the project website describing a site of roughly 380 hectares and potential capacity of up to 7.5 Mt/y. That is a significantly larger and newer development, and it competes for the same export HBI/DRI markets that LISCO's Module 3 serves. LISCO's HBI export tenders — several of which have been reported this year — are the commercial channel at stake.

A technology contest inside one company. LISCO has pursued both Midrex and EnergIron paths. A Midrex-supervised revamp of existing modules and a possible new EnergIron plant are not mutually exclusive, but they do mean LISCO is deliberately keeping two technology relationships alive. That gives it negotiating leverage on both, and it is a reason to expect the revamp, if it proceeds, to be scoped tightly and priced hard.

What to watch, and what would change the assessment

The Cairo meeting also coincides with the Arab Iron and Steel Union's 19th Arab Steel Summit in the same city on 3–4 November, at which Midrex's CEO was listed as a speaker. A bilateral meeting on the day after a regional conference is unremarkable; it is the sort of encounter that generates a press statement without generating a contract. Readers should weight it accordingly.

The markers that would move this from conversation to capex are specific and observable:

• A signed EPC or engineering services agreement, or a disclosed contract value.
• A stated capacity increment — even a modest one — or a completion date.
• Evidence of financing, which for a Libyan state-owned enterprise is the binding constraint far more often than technical feasibility.
• Any procurement notices for long-lead revamp items, such as reformer tubes or refractory packages.

Absent those, the honest reading is that LISCO has confirmed it intends to keep its 35-year-old DR complex at the centre of its ironmaking strategy and has chosen its original technology supplier to lead the work. The industrial logic is sound and the operational case is real — the plant is already outperforming its ratings. But a meeting in Cairo, however senior, is a long way from a purchase order, and Libya's recent history of production halts on power shortages is a reminder that the constraints on LISCO's output are at least as much about electricity and stability as about furnace design.