CITGO Sanctions a 310 Million Dollar Lake Charles Depentanizer Upgrade, Crusoe and Lancium Break Ground on a 1 Gigawatt Childress Texas AI Data Center Campus, Tropical Storm Edouard Makes Landfall at Port Arthur Without Damaging the Refining and LNG Corridor, and Venture Global Reaffirms Plaquemines Phase 2 LNG Deliveries by End of Q2 2027

CITGO Sanctions a 310 Million Dollar Lake Charles Refinery Depentanizer Upgrade with 2029 Commissioning

On September 1 CITGO Petroleum Corporation announced it is advancing its Lake Charles Refinery Depentanizer Project, a 310 million dollar investment that adds new facilities and equipment to improve naphtha upgrading capabilities at one of the largest and most complex refineries in the United States. The project converts lower value streams into higher value gasoline blend components. Once complete, it is expected to increase refinery flexibility and enhance CITGO's ability to meet continued US demand for reliable transportation fuels. The project is expected to be operational in 2029. CITGO said it will continue to work with employees, contractors, and local stakeholders as engineering, construction, and commissioning activities advance.

The CITGO announcement lands at a fitting moment. Fall turnaround season officially begins this month across the Gulf Coast, one of the two primary maintenance windows for refineries and petrochemical plants across Texas and Louisiana. And it comes on top of a persistent US refined products supply picture where domestic crack spreads have remained wide through 2026 and where Motiva Port Arthur, Exxon Beaumont, TotalEnergies Port Arthur, and Valero were held to planned production through this week's tropical storm event.

Crusoe and Lancium Break Ground on a 1 Gigawatt AI Data Center Campus in Childress Texas

On September 3 Crusoe and Lancium confirmed they are moving into third quarter construction on the 1.0 gigawatt Childress Texas AI data center campus first announced on July 15. The site spans 270 acres owned by Lancium in the Texas Panhandle, and the grid connected campus will be purpose built to support the AI computational requirements of a leading hyperscale technology company. Under the partnership structure the two companies previously used in Abilene, Lancium owns the land, secures the power interconnect (a 1 gigawatt ERCOT interconnect already fully approved), and manages energy orchestration for the campus, while Crusoe designs, builds, and operates the AI data center itself. The campus will incorporate behind the meter solar generation and battery energy storage to support on site power needs, along with a closed loop non evaporative liquid cooling system designed to minimize water consumption. At full scale, the site will support the deployment of hundreds of thousands of the industry's most advanced AI accelerators. Construction is expected to create thousands of local construction jobs and more than 100 long term positions in Childress County.

The Childress campus is the second Crusoe Lancium site built under this same operating framework, and it is the newest visible addition to a Texas Panhandle and Texas hyperscale build out that also includes Fermi America's Project Matador (11 gigawatts scalable to 17 gigawatts near Amarillo), the Anthropic Nexus Data Centers Hubbard Texas campus (1.6 gigawatts of behind the meter gas fired power supported by Google financial guarantees), the QTS Lancium Clean Campus in Hall County Texas (11 buildings at 1 gigawatt over 465 acres for 10 billion dollars), and the Prometheus Istmo Pecos campus in Reeves County (1.5 gigawatts behind the meter with a path to 2.5 gigawatts).

Tropical Storm Edouard Makes Landfall at Port Arthur, and the Gulf Coast Refining and LNG Corridor Stays Online

Tropical Storm Edouard made landfall near Port Arthur Texas on September 1 with sustained winds of approximately 50 miles per hour and gusts to 59 miles per hour. Industrial Info Resources tracked 24 power plants representing 14.7 gigawatts of nameplate generation capacity and 4 refineries representing 1.8 million barrels per day of capacity inside the cone of uncertainty at the peak of the forecast. The Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Lake Charles corridor contains some of the densest concentrations of refining, chemical, petrochemical, terminal, and pipeline infrastructure in the country. Motiva Port Arthur, the largest refinery in the United States, along with Valero Energy, TotalEnergies, and BASF facilities in the region, went into monitoring mode. Motiva Enterprises, Exxon Mobil Beaumont, and TotalEnergies Port Arthur told contractors to stay home or sent them home on Tuesday morning while keeping the full complement of employees on hand, and all three sources said planned production was maintained. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement reported no shut ins of offshore oil and gas operations. Three LNG vessels stayed docked at Cheniere's Sabine Pass export plant during landfall while four other vessels waited offshore, and Cheniere said it would modify operations only if deemed necessary. Edouard weakened rapidly over southeastern Texas and dissipated on Wednesday.

The Fall 2026 Gulf Coast turnaround season begins this month and runs through November, one of the two primary maintenance windows for refineries and petrochemical plants across Texas and Louisiana. Motiva Port Arthur, Valero Corpus Christi, Marathon Galveston Bay, and multiple ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, LyondellBasell, and Chevron Phillips units are expected to enter scheduled turnarounds through the quarter.

Venture Global Reaffirms Plaquemines Phase 2 LNG Deliveries by End of Q2 2027, and the Gulf Coast LNG Execution Curve Holds

On September 1 Venture Global told customers of its Plaquemines Phase 2 export plant in Louisiana that it remains on track to begin delivering contracted cargoes on schedule at previously agreed prices, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. In a letter sent to customers on Tuesday, the Arlington Virginia based company said it remains committed to starting long term deliveries from Plaquemines Phase 2 by the end of the second quarter of 2027 despite a recent surge in global gas prices. Plaquemines Phase 1 commercial operations date remains targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026, and Plaquemines is on track to export 347 to 369 cargoes in 2026. Venture Global's CP2 project is progressing well and remains on track to produce first LNG in the second half of 2027, considerably faster from FID than any large scale project in the history of the LNG industry. Exxon Mobil and Chevron are among Plaquemines Phase 2's customers.

Sempra Infrastructure's Port Arthur Pipeline Louisiana Connector is now in service. The 72 mile 42 inch diameter pipeline capable of moving 2 billion cubic feet per day of US natural gas was placed in service on June 9 (delivered ahead of schedule and under budget with capital expenditures under 1 billion dollars). The line runs from the Gillis hub north of Lake Charles Louisiana to the Port Arthur LNG export terminal in southeast Texas, interconnects with the Gillis Hub Pipeline and Sempra's 25.5 billion cubic feet LA Storage facility (expected to begin operations in the second quarter of 2027), and will feed the 13 million ton per year Port Arthur LNG Phase 1 currently under construction. Port Arthur LNG Phase 1 Train 1 is expected to enter commercial operation in 2027 and Train 2 in 2028. Sempra's sanctioned Port Arthur LNG Phase 2 Trains 3 and 4 (a combined 13 million tons per year) are targeting commercial operations in 2030 and 2031. The sanctioned Sempra Port Arthur North Project (27 million tons per year across four trains) opened FERC pre filing last week and would begin exporting LNG in the second half of 2034.

NextDecade reported in its second quarter 2026 update that Rio Grande LNG Trains 1 and 2 are 74.0 percent complete overall, with engineering at 99.1 percent, procurement at 97.8 percent, construction at 58.9 percent, and commissioning at 0.6 percent. Train 3 is 50.4 percent complete overall, Train 4 is 15.5 percent, and Train 5 is 9.4 percent. NextDecade continues to expect first gas into the Rio Grande LNG Facility in the second half of 2026 and first LNG production from Train 1 in the first half of 2027. Cheniere received FERC approval on June 23 to feed propane into part of Train 7 equipment at Corpus Christi Stage 3, and Train 7 was tracking to produce first LNG in early August with commercial service by September. Once all seven Stage 3 trains are operational, total Corpus Christi facility production capacity will exceed 25 million tons per year, and Cheniere is also building a 5 million ton per year midscale Trains 8 and 9 expansion (targeting substantial completion in the second half of 2028) plus a separate 5 million ton per year Sabine Pass expansion targeting completion in 2028.

Meta Advances the 5 GW Hyperion Campus Toward 7,500 Construction Jobs, and Anthropic Confirms 5 GW of Google Cloud TPU Capacity Through 2027

Meta continued advancing the 5 gigawatt 50 billion dollar Hyperion campus in Richland Parish Louisiana this week. The campus spans approximately 2,250 acres and 4 million square feet at full build out. Meta expanded the project from 2 gigawatts to 5 gigawatts in July, and construction employment is now projected to climb from approximately 3,700 workers today to 7,500 workers at peak construction. Once operational, the data center will support approximately 1,000 permanent roles across technical, engineering, safety, and facilities teams, with Louisiana Economic Development estimating an additional 1,900 indirect new jobs in the Northeast Louisiana region for a total of 2,900 job opportunities. The full build out is not expected to be complete until 2036.

Anthropic separately continued to lock in AI compute capacity at gigawatt scale. Sundar Pichai and Alphabet confirmed this week that Anthropic has now secured approximately 5 gigawatts of Google Cloud TPU capacity coming online through 2027, on top of the 20 gigawatt Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone XPU platform that Fluidstack began deploying in mid 2026. Anthropic has committed to renting more than 10 gigawatts of servers from cloud providers to date. Google separately agreed in April to invest up to 40 billion dollars in Anthropic (10 billion dollars now at a 350 billion dollar valuation with another 30 billion dollars tied to performance milestones), and Amazon added a 5 billion dollar investment, part of a broad agreement under which Anthropic is expected to spend up to 100 billion dollars for approximately 5 gigawatts of compute capacity over time. The Anthropic Nexus Data Centers Hubbard Texas campus (1.6 gigawatts of on site gas fired power backed by 15 billion dollars in bank financing led by Morgan Stanley and Google financial guarantees) is one of the anchor tenant sites in that pipeline.

AGC Confirms Private Nonresidential Down 4.7 Percent Year Over Year, and the Offsite Construction Market Continues to Grow Because the Labor Constraint Is Not Going Away

AGC's August 3 analysis of Census Bureau data confirmed that total US construction spending reached 2.167 trillion dollars at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in June, with private nonresidential construction up 0.1 percent for the month but down 4.7 percent compared to June 2025. Private residential construction decreased 0.3 percent for the month and was down 4.7 percent year over year. BLS's September 3 update confirmed US construction employment reached 8.343 million preliminary in July 2026, up 22,000 month over month from a revised 8.321 million in June. ABC's projected 2026 workforce gap remains at approximately 349,000 net new construction workers required in 2026 rising to 456,000 net new workers in 2027, with the AGC 2025 Workforce Survey continuing to show 92 percent of firms report difficulty filling positions, 88 percent of firms hiring craft workers report unfilled openings, and 45 percent of surveyed contractors reporting worker shortages as the leading cause of project delays.

Against that binding constraint, the offsite construction and prefabrication market is growing at approximately 7 percent CAGR. The offsite construction market is projected to grow from 198.24 billion dollars in 2026 to 258.19 billion dollars in 2030 (per Research and Markets), and the prefabricated construction market is projected to grow from 292.31 billion dollars in 2026 to 413.11 billion dollars in 2031 at a 7.16 percent CAGR (per Mordor Intelligence). Turner Construction launched xPL Offsite in May 2025 to deliver design for manufacturing and assembly and advanced digital fabrication at scale. Prefabrication scope in 2026 has moved beyond duct racks in a warehouse to fully integrated MEP multi trade racks, skidded mechanical systems, electrical assemblies, modular wall systems, and equipment supports fabricated in controlled production environments, parallel to site work. The industrialized construction operating model is now the default for owners in data centers, healthcare, refining, petrochemicals, and LNG, because it is the only operating model that delivers schedule certainty inside a 349,000 to 499,000 net new worker gap.

The Bottom Line

This week put a fine point on the picture. CITGO sanctioned a 310 million dollar Lake Charles refinery upgrade with 2029 commissioning. Crusoe and Lancium broke ground on a 1 gigawatt AI campus in Childress Texas. Tropical Storm Edouard made landfall directly at Port Arthur and the refining and LNG corridor came through without a shut in. Venture Global reaffirmed Plaquemines Phase 2 LNG deliveries by end of Q2 2027. Sempra's 2 billion cubic feet per day Port Arthur Pipeline Louisiana Connector is now in service ahead of schedule and under budget. NextDecade Rio Grande LNG is 74 percent complete on Trains 1 and 2. Cheniere Corpus Christi Stage 3 is completing to seven trains and 25 million tons per year. Meta continued advancing the 5 gigawatt Hyperion campus toward 7,500 peak construction workers. Anthropic locked in 5 gigawatts of Google Cloud TPU capacity through 2027. AGC confirmed private nonresidential down 4.7 percent year over year against 2.167 trillion dollars in total US construction spending. BLS confirmed construction employment at 8.343 million in July, up 22,000 month over month. And the offsite construction and prefabrication market continued to grow at 7 percent CAGR because owners are converging on the industrialized fabrication and construction operating model as the only model that survives a 349,000 to 499,000 net new worker gap.

PSV Industries is built as exactly that operating model for the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Vertically integrated JV. Shop based fabrication. Craft workforce owned. Structural steel fabrication, process modules, modular skid assembly, field installation and construction, shutdowns and turnarounds, and backlog relief all executed inside a single execution model. That is what owners are consolidating scope with, and that is what wins the schedule in a fabrication and construction demand curve growing at gigawatt scale.