Greater Houston Area Home to Wealth of Fourth-Quarter Project Kickoffs

The Greater Houston area in Texas is home to more than 7 million people and encompasses nine counties.

Comprising Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Liberty, Montgomery and Waller counties, the area's massive petrochemical complex is supported by the Houston Ship Channel.

Greater Houston also encompasses nearly $71 billion worth of projects in various stages of development being tracked by Industrial Info.

This includes 77 projects, worth $5.46 billion, that are planned to kick off construction in the fourth quarter of this year. Subscribers to Industrial Info's Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Project Database can click here for a list of detailed project reports.

The graph below breaks down the 77 projects scheduled for a fourth-quarter kickoff by industry. The Power Industry leads the way with 15 projects totaling more than $2 billion in value, followed by Chemical Processing with 34 projects worth $1.4 billion, and Oil & Gas Production with two projects valued at $1.3 billion.

But not all of the projects are likely to kick off as planned. In fact, paring down the kickoffs to those with a medium (70-80%) or high (81-99%) probability of moving forward as planned brings the list down to 66 projects totaling $3 billion. The Chemical Processing Industry leads the way in the value of medium- and high-probability projects, followed by Power, then Industrial Manufacturing.

One of the leading Chemical Processing projects planned for kickoff in the fourth quarter is Occidental Petroleum Corporation's (NYSE:OXY) (Houston) plant technology conversion and expansion project at its Battleground Chlor-Alkali plant in La Porte. The existing plant produces 527,800 metric tons per year of chlorine and 580,000 metric tons per year of caustic soda.

Dubbed "Project Orca," the plan is to upgrade, modernize and expand existing manufacturing process equipment to increase plant capacity and replace the facility's diaphragm-cell technology with new membrane cell technology. If all goes according to plan, the project will wrap up in third-quarter 2026. Subscribers can click here for the project report.

In the Power Industry, one of the leading projects planned for a fourth-quarter 2023 kickoff is BlackRock Infrastructure Investment Group's (New York, New York) 101.63-megawatt Saracen Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Unit Addition in Houston. The project would use lithium-ion technology or the best available technology. Completion is planned for third-quarter 2024. Subscribers can click here for the project report.

One of the leading Industrial Manufacturing projects tentatively planned for a fourth-quarter kickoff is Agilyx ASA's (Oslo, Norway) Houston Plastic Waste Recovery Facility (Cyclyx Circularity Center). The facility would produce 330 million pounds of plastic feedstock per year to supply Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) (Irving, Texas) and LyondellBasell (NYSE:LYB) (Rotterdam, Netherlands) recycling projects. The project is planned for completion in fourth-quarter 2024. Click here for the project report.

Subscribers to Industrial Info's GMI Project and Plant databases can click here for a list of all project reports mentioned in this article and click here for the related plant profiles.