Tulsa Ports getting more calls from interested companies

Meanwhile, plans for a large solar-panel manufacturing plant — described as the biggest economic development project in state history — are in a holding pattern, at least for now.

Enel North America picked the Port of Inola to be the home of one of the largest solar cell and panel manufacturing plants in the nation, the company and its affiliate, 3Sun USA LLC, announced in May 2023.

The Italian company expects to invest more than $1 billion in the new factory and create 1,000 new, permanent jobs by 2025, it said last year.

However, plans for the Enel development are “on hold” for now, pending negotiations involving potential tax incentives and other issues with the federal government, said Andrew Ralston, Tulsa Ports’ director of economic development.

“There’s nothing happening now,” he said. “I think they are dealing with the government. Plus, it’s an election year, right?”

But port officials, who sponsored a tour of the Port of Catoosa for local news media representatives last week — including a ride on a barge — expressed little concern about the holding pattern for Enel.

Another Italian-based company, Sofidel, has called the Tulsa Port of Inola home since 2020.

Sheila Shook, director of workforce and education for Tulsa Ports, pointed out that when Public Service Company of Oklahoma owned the land that is now the Port of Inola, it took PSO and Sofidel five years from concept to Sofidel’s opening.

“These projects … that’s the one thing I’ve learned about economic development — it is not a fast process,” she said.

“But right now we have had more interest … in the last year, to year and a half, than we have in many years … (in) Inola specifically, but both” there and the Port of Catoosa, she said.

PSO transferred 2,000 acres of what is now the Port of Inola to Tulsa Ports in late 2019.

Tulsa Ports administers the Port of Catoosa, dedicated in 1971 and dubbed an “inland sea port” by then-President Richard Nixon, who spoke at its dedication. Tulsa Ports also owns land at the Port of Inola, about 20 miles southeast and downstream along the Verdigris River.

Officials last week touted the Port of Catoosa as being part of a 25,000-mile river transport network in the eastern half of the U.S., including the Missouri, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Most barge traffic in and out of Catoosa travels north and south, via the Virdigris, Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, through the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System.

From Catoosa to the port of New Orleans and back, barges transport products such as steel, wheat, soybeans, fertilizer and other materials over a 445-mile journey that typically takes eight to 10 days one-way, Shook said.

Many of those products are either transported in or out from around the world.

Tulsa Ports, the umbrella organization administered by the City of Tulsa and Rogers County, owns the port land near both Catoosa and Inola.

It does not receive any government funding, Shook said.

About half of Tulsa Ports’ revenue comes from leasing its land to private businesses; the other half from barge fees.

Asked if she and her team had a wish list for companies that could be established in Inola and/or Catoosa, Shook said:

“Advanced manufacturing. Companies that are using robotics and those kinds of things, and we have some of those here,” she said.

She also said Tulsa Ports was trying to attract auto parts manufacturing companies.

“We’re thinking about those kinds of things — what could be built. We want to see what’s next.

“Nothing wrong with oil and gas — we know that’s important to us, but what’s next I think is coming into different types of energy … the way we’re going to use energy in the future,” she said, referring to Enel.

Asked about the process of whether potential companies are more likely to reach out to Tulsa Ports, rather than local officials seeking to recruit companies, she said:

“We haven’t done a lot of (company) marketing for our site(s). The Oklahoma Department of Commerce helps with that. We also work very closely with the Tulsa Regional Chamber to kind of get the word out, but really people know about us and we get contacted through the Department of Commerce often, by lots of different kinds of companies.”

At the Port if Inola, she said, “We have a couple of different companies that would be waterway users. And so that’s exciting because it would make us a river port there. We’re in talks with two of them.”

Because of standard nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements, she declined to name any specific company.

Tulsa Ports also last August approved a plan to build a new water treatment plant at the Port of Inola at a cost of $85 million to $117 million.

Construction will start late this summer or early fall and is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2026, officials said.

In addition to trying to attract new businesses to both sites, port officials this week will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for completion of a 4.4-mile rail line connecting the Port of Inola to a major Union Pacific rail line.

Dredging, Shook said, would not necessarily be needed for the Virdigris River in Inola in order for the location of another barge port, but a perpendicular channel constructed decades earlier would.

“It would take a couple of years to get everything lined out,” she said.

Hans Albert Einstein, the son of world-renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, played a role in the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, of which Catoosa is the western-most site.

In 1991, according to a Tulsa World archive story:

“Dr. H.A. Einstein (Albert Einstein’s son), an expert on soils, helped design a system for dealing with silt. By narrowing the channel, flows could be increased and much dredging eliminated,” the article said.

The American Society of Civil Engineers now has an award named after Hans Albert Einstein.

“I think he must have thought outside of the box,” Shook said. “Because everybody was thinking this was going to happen and he was able to come in and say, ‘Oh, but …’”

“So, for the most part on the navigation system, they don’t have to dredge very often. They (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) do more of what they call ‘spot dredging’ as far as the core, because most of that sand and sediment goes downriver.”

Shook, who gives regular tours of the Port of Catoosa to elementary, middle-school and high school students, said most people don’t know of the Einstein connection.

“Who knows what all he was involved in,” she said. “He obviously was just as intelligent as his dad.”