Energy Rising: Oil and Gas Construction Boom Predicted
Eric Smith, Associate Director of the Tulane Energy Institute, says "There's a long term positive market outlook for the use of LNG worldwide and 100-percent of it will be exported. And it plays right into the Louisiana strengths. We have lots of sites with deepwater access."
Smith says the boom will likely start in Lake Charles with expanded facilities for shipping LNG. With LNG replacing coal as the predominant fuel for electrical generation, America's commanding position as an LNG exporter bodes well for Louisiana.
Closer
to home is the petrochemical processing zone along the Mississippi River in St.
James Parish. "We are approving
plants to be built on the Mississippi," Smith says. Those plants are aimed at converting natural
gas into methanol, the major chemical building blocks for the production of
plastics in the Far East.
"Shipping
[methanol] to China, where it's converted to olefins over there," Smith
says. "That's one of the reasons
the Chinese and the Taiwanese are such enthusiastic investors [in Louisiana] they
need that supply of methanol for their own processes."
Construction of these plants will mean jobs for skilled crafts-persons to build these multi-billion dollar facilities. "There's lots of good news on the construction front and once you get these plants up it doesn't take a lot of people to run them. But the people who do run them will make salaries in the hundred thousand dollar-a-year range."