MCALLEN, Texas - William Dietrich, CEO of the Port of Brownsville, has it on good authority that the welders working on NextDecade’s liquefied natural gas project at the port are the best of the best.
He says the plaudits have come from Bechtel, the company in charge of hiring workers for the planned export terminal.
“Just and sitting down with NextDecade and getting a better understanding of this project and their partner, Bechtel… some very neat compliments come our way,” Dietrich said.
“Usually, when you're dealing with tier one organization, or any organization for that matter, there's always complaints, right? Not too many times a day do I get a call that says, ‘hey, man, I just love life, everything's great.’ Usually it is hey, can we do this, can we do this better, can we do this better?”
Not so with Bechtel, he said.
“It was a dinner conversation we had, and this is a snippet of the conversation: they're so satisfied with the talent of the local workforce. And there was one specific example that was given, and they were talking about industry standards as it relates to welds. In the industry standard, there's a three percent failure rate in the sense of these welds have to be done over again. They can accept that, when they expect the welds that three percent have to be re-welded,” Dietrich said.
“Well, at this site right now, less than one percent have to be re-welded. They said that the welders and what the Rio Grande Valley has produced with the workforce in place has been unbelievable. And they quoted it as the most successful project in Bechtel history. So hat’s off to all our people in the Valley.”
Dietrich made his comments in an in-depth powerpoint presentation to the South Texas Manufacturers Association. The meeting was held at the DoubleTree Suites by Hilton in McAllen.
He said Bechtel is utilizing a huge number of workers for NextDecade’s LNG export terminal and the vast majority are from the Valley.
“NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG is an $18.5 billion project and they are creating 5,000-plus jobs during construction. They're at 4,000 right now and they'll be ramping up to about 5,500 next year. The 300 permanent jobs number is going up to 400. This is this is great for the Rio Grande Valley,” Dietrich said.
“And guess what… and this is the great news… 73 percent of them are from the region. Seventy-three percent of the people who are working on the NextDecade Rio Grande LNG site have been harvested locally. That is amazing.”
Dietrich said he had dinner the other night with Matt Schatzman, CEO of NextDecade.
“And I asked him, I said, in hindsight, when you signed the agreement with the Port of Brownsville, did you think that you were going to have this much local talent? He said: ‘no, it surprised us.’ In the contract, they have to guarantee 30 percent of the workers are local hires. They're at 73 percent and that has been consistent through the entirety of the project, from when they started at 1,000 jobs, 2,000, 3,000 and actually the number is actually edging up. That's fantastic.”
Dietrich continued:
“So when Tier One companies come down and say, you know what, you might have a labor force problem, I say, no, not really. We might have areas that we need to improve. There's no doubt, just like any community, that we're going to have to add talent as we move along.
“But nevertheless, the NextDecade site, Bechtel, which is the largest construction company in the world, the oldest in the United States, has said that this Rio Grande (LNG) project has been their best one ever because of the local talent.”
