Chemical association head touts industry ‘renaissance’

When Dan Borné, president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, spoke to the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge in 2007, it was a “perilous” time for his members, he recalls. The plants were caught in a “jaws of death” between high natural gas prices and the offshoring of much of the industry. “All of that has changed, and has changed dramatically,” says Borné, who addressed the Rotarians again today. When the price of a barrel of oil is seven times that of the price of a unit of natural gas, “Louisiana and Texas can compete favorably against anybody in the world, because so much of what we make comes from natural gas, and so much of what the rest of the world makes comes from oil,” he says. Now, oil is at about $90 per barrel, or about 30 times the price of natural gas. That ratio is spurring billions of dollars worth of new and potential projects in Louisiana, he says, and is creating the need for 34,000 more workers in the Lake Charles and Baton Rouge areas. However, the competition remains stiff, both from Texas, Louisiana’s traditional rival, and other states with access to an abundance of natural gas—including Pennsylvania and Ohio—as well as other countries, such as Malaysia. —David Jacobs