Why Logistics Must Be in the Room Before the Lease Is Signed

Por Luke King

Industrial sites are getting bigger, timelines are getting tighter, and the window to get logistics right is shrinking. That was the central tension explored during the “Building Project-Ready Industrial Hubs” panel at Breakbulk Americas, moderated by Thorsten Schultz, project director Europe at UTC Overseas.

Itoro Ibanga, senior project logistics specialist at Air Liquide, Janet Galati, vice president of energy sector growth at the Greater Baton Rouge Economic Partnership, and Janine M. Mansour, director of trade development at the Port of New Orleans, offered a ground-level view of what differentiates a competitive industrial site, and what goes wrong when logistics, utilities and community engagement are treated as afterthoughts.

For Galati, site readiness is what companies ask about first. “The timeline to get a site development-ready is more critical than ever,” she said. “We’re essentially marketing properties that are almost turnkey for development at this point.”

Louisiana, she noted, offers an instructive case: The state has around 125 sites with Louisiana Economic Development (LED) certification, meaning environmental assessments, geotech reports and wetlands mitigation are already complete. With US$260 billion in announced capital investment in a single year — including a US$100 billion SpaceX spaceport on the state’s southern coastline — the approach appears to be paying off.

Logistics, Galati said, has to be in the room from day one. When Hyundai Steel selected the Riverplex mega site near Baton Rouge for the first low-carbon steel mill in the U.S., the logistics question was inseparable from the site decision. “The company is not going to put in a Letter of Intent (LOI) for a site without knowing the logistics is going to work.”

Mansour drew a distinction between sectors where port analysis runs in parallel with site selection — LNG and steel, given their raw material volumes — and projects that treat logistics as a construction-phase problem only. When a major petrochemical company reviewed its engineering designs ahead of a Louisiana investment, early port engagement revealed it needed a private barge dock. “Fortunately, before they went to construction, we were able to identify that it was going to be in their best interest,” Mansour said.

Calling Planning Pioneers

For Ibanga, the ask is simple. “We shouldn’t be only known as ‘the cargo is needed yesterday group,’” he said. “We should be the first in the room — the pioneers of planning. Does the site have port access, rail access, barge access? Let us not be known for ‘cargo needed yesterday,’ and then wonder why air freight on a charter for a certain breakbulk piece might cost up to US$2.5 million. It could have been avoided if we planned early.”

Before a lease is signed, Ibanga’s team assesses transportation clearances, soil bearing pressure for heavy haul trucks and early utility engagement to schedule necessary power outages. “You don’t want a situation where we’re behind schedule — that’s additional cost to the project,” he said.

Bridge analysis, he added, is routinely underestimated. On a project in Boise, Idaho, a route that looked optimal on paper ran through territory where a Native American community had a history of protesting heavy cargo movements. The route was abandoned, replaced by a costlier barge alternative that then ran into Pacific Northwest winter weather. The equipment eventually arrived, including air separation cold boxes “the scale of small skyscrapers.” “That’s where a community can spoil your project,” Ibanga said.

Community engagement ran as a thread through all three speakers. Galati described projects canceled not for technical or financial reasons, but because residents were left to form their own view. “Sometimes they’re hearing about a project for the first time when the company applies for a permit. That is not what you want to do.”

The Port of New Orleans is navigating exactly this with its new greenfield container terminal in Violet, Louisiana — a community with 20% unemployment where truck traffic concerns ran high. Rather than absorb the objections, the port redesigned terminal access to include an elevated roadway connecting directly to the interstate. “It added a few more million dollars to the total project cost,” Mansour said, “but all in all, it’ll be a positive thing” — a change that improved both community relations and terminal efficiency.

The panelists underlined that none of these major workstreams — site readiness, logistics planning, community engagement — operates in isolation: Get one wrong and the others unravel. In a market where mega-investments are moving fast and competition between locations is fierce, the sites that do the early work are the ones still standing when a company finally makes its call.

Photo (L-R): Thorsten Schultz, Itoro Ibanga, Janine Mansour, Janet Galati. Credit: Marco Wang Photography