President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night followed a week spent in Washington by Port Fourchon officials discussing the port’s ambitious future expansion plans and its vital role in America’s energy industry with our federal delegation and administration staff.

Currently, Port Fourchon is one of the busiest ports in the nation, and services over 90 percent of all deepwater offshore energy production. We are also the conduit through which the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port brings ashore millions of barrels of oil per day, making Port Fourchon the gateway to nearly 20 percent of the nation’s oil supply.

Since 1960, the Greater Lafourche Port Commission has taken its role as an economic and community developer to heart – growing the port from one small dock facility on the bank of Bayou Lafourche to a sprawling industrial services hub with over 70,000 linear feet of waterside dock space situated on nearly 2,000 acres of developed land. Today, we are responsible for an economic impact to the state of Louisiana of nearly $4 billion annually, including over $650 million in household earnings per year, and we are proud to say that 80 percent of this economic impact stays right here in Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes.

As we have grown on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, so too has our understanding of the dynamic environment in which we work, and our ability to plan and build for the challenges of the future through the application of our holistic resiliency development philosophy. Our role in the energy industry has seen us grow into the largest, most concentrated energy services hub in the nation.

Over the past 58 years, our community has seen the ups and downs of the energy industry, and we have been the home of many comeback stories, some of which are being written right now. In recent years, we have been working on planning our future development in a manner that will broaden the base of services Port Fourchon is ideally suited to provide to industry. Through this future planning, we have crafted a holistically resilient vision of our future. This vision requires large-scale investment in infrastructure, both on land and in the water, that will position the United States as the offshore energy services hub for the Western Hemisphere.

This is why we were so encouraged to see that our vision for the future of Port Fourchon and our role in America’s long-term energy dominance lines up perfectly with the administration’s priorities as outlined in the State of the Union address.

Listening to the president’s speech, it is clear that Port Fourchon’s package of future development meets all of the goals of this administration’s infrastructure vision. Not only do we offer one coordinated vision to usher in American energy dominance, but we also offer the opportunity to repair and replace a crumbling road by completing the elevation of La. 1, deepen one of the nation’s busiest and most strategic ports, construct a world-class shipyard facility to enable the United States to bring approximately 1,300 good-paying fabrication jobs back home to the U.S. and utilize the dredge materials from our channel deepening works to restore thousands of acres of our precious coast to the landscape – providing thousands of commercial and recreational fishermen with more opportunity to live and work where we love to be.

We aren't relying on the government alone. Currently, Port Fourchon operates with no debt, which allows us to use that capacity to maximize and leverage dozens of funding sources to fuel our growth. We also stand side by side with our tenants, partners and friends in the industry who also realize that the port's synergy with industry fuels our community's dream for a more prosperous, secure future.

The Greater Lafourche Port Commission stands ready to play our part in this “new American moment” where we all share in long-term prosperity by increasing the nation’s capacity to bring home jobs and investment, restore our coast to provide our built infrastructure and communities natural protective buffers and flood-risk reduction and keep our recreational and commercial fishery bountiful.

Quite simply put, we are Louisiana’s best-positioned project to attract a large-scale infrastructure investment under this program.

Chett Chiasson is executive director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission.