United States Leadership Forum

NEW ORLEANS – July 18, 2011. The leading sponsor of a planned deep-water transfer terminal near the mouth of the Mississippi River said Monday that the $1 billion-plus project could have investors lined up in the next three months.

Designed to accommodate mega-vessels that are too deep to navigate the waterway, the state is not expected to contribute financially to the Louisiana International Gulf Transfer Terminal, a cargo transfer point that would be built on a 260-acre tact along the east bank of Southwest Pass in Plaquemines Parish.

State Sen. A.G. Crowe, R-Slidell, who sponsored legislation to create the Louisiana International Deep Water Gulf Transfer Terminal Authority, a state agency, in 2008, on Monday pegged an initial investment in the project at between $250,000 and $500,000.

Crowe said project officials plan to travel to China in the coming weeks to huddle with potential investors, adding that work on the mega port will likely be completed in time to take advantage of the multibillion-dollar widening under way at the Panama Canal, slated to be finished by 2014.

“The way it’s set up and the way it’s staged right now, is that everything is in place,” Crowe said Monday in an interview at Tulane University, following a presentation on the terminal amid a day of panels on energy developments as well as energy security. “Everything is in place, there’s no negotiating the lease, it’s in the legislation,” Crowe said. “All the rules and requirements are spelled out. All that’s put to bed.”

Pointing to a recent lease agreement between Mediterranean Shipping Company and the Port of New Orleans, allowing the port to retain its largest shipping carrier for another decade under a new lease, Crowe said he believes the terminal will fill what he sees as a need for additional capacity to handle container cargo.

The planned terminal could be one solution, he said, because the project would be constructed in open ocean water, and ships that are too big for other inland ports would deliver their cargo to the terminal, while smaller vessels would then ferry it upriver.

Crowe was one of several speakers at Louisiana Energy Day at Tulane, which included government officials and business and community leaders, including discussions on energy development. Speakers included U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., and Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association.

David Welker, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, discussed possible terrorist threats to the state’s oil and gas infrastructure.

Welker said terrorists could target different elements of the maritime industry, “because that is the mechanism that we use predominately to get oil from the Middle East to the United States,” and that federal officials are ready to respond to such threats.

“They’re targeting various entities along the supply chain: oil and gas, and including all the platforms,” he said. “And probably within the last 10 years, they’ve planned or attempted attacks within oil tankers and looking to disrupt the oil supply to the United States, really because of the economic value and economic impact.”

Welker said a terrorist incident along the waterway could have major economic implications. “If they sink one oil tanker, there’s certainly a lot of money there, but for our economic stability, in our region right here, if traffic was to cease along the Mississippi River, the economic impact to the rest of the United States would be astronomical.”

Source:  New Orleans Times-Picayune