Port Fourchon CEO: recovery is closer

Port Fourchon was rolling along on April 19, 2010, servicing the needs of more than 90 percent of the deepwater rigs exploring for and producing oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The next day, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and work came to a screeching halt.

“We were expecting 2010 to be a banner year for the port in terms of activity and revenue, then the rig exploded and everything changed,” said Greater Lafourche Port Commission Executive Director Chett Chiasson, who had taken over the director’s chair only a few months before the incident.

“We went from a progressive mode at the port to one of protecting the port and the beach and almost everything else associated with it from the oil,” he recalled. “Port personnel worked with just about every group and agency imaginable to clean the beaches and deal with all of the tasks associated with a spill of that magnitude.

“It was something most of us had never really experienced before,” Chiasson said.

And then … just when everyone thought the damage and associated risks that came along with the spill was at least under control and one could possibly see a light at the end of the tunnel, “the moratorium hit,” Chiasson lamented.

President Barack Obama, in response to the explosion and subsequent spill, called a halt to all deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico in May 2010.

“The port was dealing fairly well with the oil spill and its associated problems, but the moratorium caused us to shift our thinking and some of our business processes. We are still very much in that mode today,” the director said.

Port officials spent countless hours meeting with just about anyone at the federal level willing to listen to their story about how the moratorium was, at best, a misguided policy, and how it was annihilating a growing, prospering industry, taking with it south Louisiana’s chief job source.

“We’ve made several trips to Washington, D.C., bringing people from all sizes of businesses to explain to members of the Obama administration how their policies were killing jobs and strangling revenue and growth,” Chiasson added.

The scramble to keep tenants despite the lockdown on Gulf exploration was immediate. Chiasson said the decision to drop monthly rent beginning in July 2010 was made after commissioners surveyed a broad cross-section of companies that operate from Port Fourchon.

The rate reduction is slated to end in June.

“We took the rent reduction action as a proactive step to help out our tenants in an uncertain time,” the director noted.

Obama officially lifted the deepwater drilling moratorium in October 2010, but drilling permits have been slow to return.

Despite the trickle, fewer than a dozen permits have been issued, the news isn’t all gloomy. Port Fourchon is servicing 10 of the new permits.

“We are seeing activity picking up at the port with the permits that have just been issued, but we are not back to where we were before the spill,” Chiasson said.

In contrast, Port Fourchon was servicing 33 rigs operating in the Gulf’s deepwater prior to April 20, 2010.

“We’re still 23 rigs down from before the spill, but I am hoping that the worst of the storm has passed,” Chiasson said.

With the ongoing push to return drilling to its pre-Deepwater Horizon explosion activity rate, Port Fourchon continues to upgrade.

“We’re still expanding the port facilities in order to make it the premier port destination on the Gulf,” the director said. Work on more than 1,800 square feet of bulkhead started shortly after the spill, and an additional 1,100 square feet of bulkhead was completed and leased.

It’s a semblance of success in today’s post-permitorium/moratorium environment. But considering what Port Fourchon and the oil industry have endured over the past year, Chiasson is encouraged about the days ahead.

“We’ve dealt with some pretty serious issues and challenges over the last 12 months as an organization and an entity deeply involved in servicing the offshore industry,” he said. “We learned some lessons and faced some challenges we never really expected to face. I believe we’ve learned some things from [the explosion and its aftermath]. Now we will try to prosper from it.”