Shaw to add 2,900 La. jobs in nuclear deal

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Aug 26, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:20 p.m.

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The Shaw Group Inc. said it will add 2,900 jobs in the next decade — 1,500 corporate jobs chiefly in Baton Rouge, 1,400 manufacturing jobs in Lake Charles — to create a nuclear manufacturing center in Louisiana.

Lake Charles will see an initial $100 million investment in a Port of Lake Charles facility to make nuclear power components, while the state has secured an agreement from Shaw to keep its headquarters in Baton Rouge for at least 15 years, according to Stephen Moret, secretary of the state Department of Economic Development.

State officials said at the Capitol this morning that it is one of the biggest economic deals in state history, one that’s much more valuable to Louisiana’s future than the lost ThyssenKrupp steel mill project that went to Alabama in 2007.

Shaw will get $210 million in total incentives over a 10-year period while Louisiana will benefit from $724 million in additional taxes from the project at the state and local levels, Moret said.

On the job front, an economic impact study by LSU economist Dek Terrell calculates more than $1 billion in new wages created by the nuclear project in the next decade.

“I’m excited that two cities get a big victory out of this,” Moret said. “This will be one of the biggest projects announced in the U.S. this year in terms of total jobs.”

Among other states, Louisiana defeated North Carolina, where Shaw employs more than 1,000 at its Power Group divisional headquarters in Charlotte. The company also employs hundreds in Houston and could have chosen Texas.

Moret said the threat of other states stealing Shaw’s headquarters away from Baton Rouge has been a real one in recent years, more real than most people in Baton Rouge realize.

That makes securing the headquarters and growing Shaw corporate professional jobs from 2,000 now to 3,500 in the state by 2018 a huge win, Moret said. That payroll will add $101 million in new payroll to Shaw’s existing professional payroll of about $230 million a year in the state.

In Lake Charles, the 1,400 jobs will create an additional new payroll of $70 million there at a new joint venture of Shaw and Westinghouse Electric, the global nuclear reactor firm. Shaw bought 20 percent of Westinghouse in 2006 and is a partner in developing Westinghouse nuclear reactors that will be needed for an estimated three dozen new nuclear power plants in the works now in the United States.

Shaw and Westinghouse will own 50 percent each of the manufacturing center in Lake Charles, which also is expected to pick up work rebuilding reactors at existing nuclear sites.

Louisiana and Baton Rouge Area Chamber officials have worked formally on the project for 18 months, with seeds of a new nuclear manufacturing project going back several years to the introduction of a new permitting process that makes obtaining a nuclear construction and operating license easier, Moret said.

High energy prices and looming restrictions on greenhouse gases make nuclear energy’s potential much stronger, he said.