New Orleans Trade Leader Talks Port Development

Michael Hecht recently told The Waterways Journal, “Our infrastructure is catching up to global shipping realities.”

Hecht heads Greater New Orleans, Inc., the regional economic development organization that drives business growth across 10 parishes in southeast Louisiana (Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist, Tangipahoa and Washington).

Under Hecht’s leadership, GNO, Inc. entered into an operational partnership with the World Trade Center in New Orleans. This consolidation of resources established a dedicated international trade division designed to elevate the region’s standing against competing Gulf ports like Houston and Mobile.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry appointed Hecht to lead the coordination for the new deepwater container terminal in St. Bernard Parish. The Louisiana International Terminal (LIT) aims to dramatically boost the region’s global shipping capacity and state tax revenue. Hecht is a driving force behind Louisiana’s collaborative push to consolidate marketing and infrastructure across Louisiana’s five regional ports. He strongly advocates for unified trade strategies to capture market share in the central United States.

Competitive Challenge

“The challenge is that the Crescent City Bridge has an air draft that restricts container vessels to those carrying about 9,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units),” he said. The Crescent City Connection, formerly the Greater New Orleans (GNO) Bridge, is a pair of cantilever bridges that carry U.S. Highway 90 Business over the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Together, they are tied as the fifth-longest cantilever bridges in the world. The bridges have a vertical clearance or air gap of about 150 feet (45.7 meters) above the standard water level, depending on the river’s fluctuations.

The LIT, being developed downriver from that restriction, aims to capture some of the container trade that now flows to Houston and Mobile. Houston is the container powerhouse port on the Gulf Coast, handling a record-breaking 4.3 million TEUs during the 2025 calendar year.

The Port of Mobile is coming up strong, though, handling more than 500,000 TEUs annually. It is the deepest container port in the Gulf, with a 50-foot channel. By contrast, the Port of New Orleans handled about 430,000 TEUs in its most recent fiscal year. Many attribute Mobile’s port success to the Alabama Port Authority, a unified body that governs Mobile and many of the state’s other inland ports with a coordinated strategy.

“If we don’t get this new facility, New Orleans is essentially out of the container game,” Hecht said. “We should see permits issued this summer, and we expect to break ground by the end of the year.” He hopes to see the LIT operational by 2030. Once it’s up and running, it is expected eventually to handle between 500,000 and 600,000 TEUs a year.”

He continued, “It is the only deepwater port being built from the ground up in the U.S. It will get New Orleans back into the container game, and it will be a linchpin of the greater cooperation between the five deepwater ports on the Lower Mississippi that everyone agrees we need.”

Economic Diversity

Beyond traditional maritime trade, Hecht has championed economic diversification, securing $50 million in federal funding for the H2theFuture initiative to develop and export clean hydrogen. He notes that Louisiana accounts for 61 percent of the nation’s natural gas exports. “Louisiana’s natural gas exports to Europe have boomed due to disruptions in Ukraine and the Middle East,” he said. “Ever since COVID, economic trends have favored Louisiana and its maritime advantages specifically. Every time the price of a barrel of oil goes up by $1, that’s an extra $12 million into Louisiana’s treasury.”

Hecht cites tens of billions of dollars’ worth of oil and gas investments in the state in recent years. Cameron LNG and Venture Global LNG are two major, distinct LNG export operators and developers located primarily in Cameron Parish, La. While Cameron LNG is an established, multi-partner facility, Venture Global is an independent developer heavily expanding its footprint in the same region.

Hecht also cites the Mars Shell offshore oil patch, which recently (May 20) announced that it has hit a historic milestone, becoming the first offshore asset in the United States to produce one billion barrels of oil over its 30-year lifetime.

Louisiana also boasts a strong defense and aerospace sector, which generates a $17 billion annual economic impact and supports more than 117,000 jobs. Hecht noted the partnership between Bollinger Shipyards and Finnish shipbuilder Rauma Marine Construction to build a new fleet of Arctic Security Cutters for the U.S. Coast Guard.

“New Orleans was founded 350 years ago, and trade was the raison d’etre from the beginning,” he said. “Bienville, its founder (Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville) saw its location as the best place on the river from which to coordinate a trade empire.”

Workforce Development

A key part of the region’s maritime growth is workforce development, and Hecht’s next stop after his interview was an event at Delgado Community College, whose Maritime and Industrial Training Center has been designated and continually renewed by the U.S. Maritime Administration as a Center of Excellence for Domestic Maritime Workforce Training and Education.

“We have several excellent maritime training programs in the state, but we’ve never had a full-blown maritime academy that pipelines kids into maritime and related careers,” Hecht said. He said he’d like to see something in Louisiana like the Webb Institute on Long Island, a specialized engineering institute founded in 1889 that offers a single degree program in naval architecture and marine engineering. He noted that Chris Allard, CEO of Metal Shark, was trained there.