The Port of Lake Charles will make $100 million worth of improvements to its Bulk Terminal No. 1 in preparation for its 25-year
operating agreement with the Leucadia Energy gasification plant project, according to port staff.
The port has partnered with Lake Charles Clean Energy, a subsidiary of Leucadia, which will use new gasification technologies
to cleanly produce industrial liquid and gas products from petroleum coke. The products — methanol, sulfuric acid, argon,
carbon dioxide and hydrogen — will be sold by the company to BP, Air Products and Chemicals Inc. and Denbury Onshore LLC.
The project, estimated at $2.5 billion,
will be located on port property and adjacent to the port’s bulk cargo
handling facility.
The partnership will result in 1,500 construction jobs over a
period of three years, and once finished, the plant will create
165 high-paying permanent jobs. Also, the operation of the plant
will bring 50 new full-time jobs to the port, positions needed
for the additional loading and unloading of related cargo.
Construction will begin by mid-2013.
The port’s role will also include
loading trucks, railcars, barges and ships with the company’s liquid
products for transportation
to customers. Port Executive Director Bill Rase said the impact on
the port will be substantial: it will double the cargo tonnage handled
at the terminal to an estimated 6 million tons each year and will
require cargo handling 24/7.
The actual transformation of the bulk
terminal will start instantly with the relocation of port customers so
as not to negatively
impact customer cargo. After that, the petcoke storage area will
be reconfigured. An extra 1,000-foot concrete discharge
dock with conveyors will be built to transport inbound coke to the
storage area. Another 1,000-foot liquid dock will be built
to handle the loading of liquid products to a newly constructed
tank farm, and later to vessels and barges. This infrastructure
will allow the port to handle the additional import tonnage of 2.6
million tons of petroleum coke and the export of 1.25 million
tons of liquid products per year, according to news release.
“We’re very excited about this. It is
something we have worked on for a number of years,” Rase said. “The
ability of the group
to finally get the off-take agreements with major corporations will
allow it to be financed and move forward. We feel comfortable
this will be a successful project for the port, for clean energy,
and for the community.”