Big Oil knew it was wrecking Louisiana’s coast, records show
Now parish lawsuits, including one in front of the Supreme Court, could make oil giants pay to restore the state’s vanishing marshes.
This piece is co-published by ExxonKnews and DeSmog, a leading outlet covering climate disinformation and accountability.
Scott Eustis is doing what he can to keep Louisiana afloat. As a veteran wetland and fisheries researcher and lifelong resident, he says he is sure of what caused the damage to the state’s delicate marshlands and drowning coast: the oil drilling that employed his grandfather decades prior.
“My granddad worked for these companies,” said Eustis. “If he were still alive, he would tell you, straight up: They owe us the land.”
For a century, oil companies dredged canals through coastal wetlands, dissecting marshes to get to and from wells, and dumped toxic wastewater into marshes and unlined earthen pits. Those wells, canals, pits, and leftover pollution were largely abandoned. Oil drilling is a dwindling portion of the state’s economy today, but its legacy is a fixture of the now-sinking landscape.
Louisiana loses around a football field’s worth of its wetlands every hour, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and the problem is worsening as sea levels rise. As the coast sinks, home insurance rates skyrocket, local ecosystems collapse, shrimping and fishing economies shrink, and the state’s natural flood barriers disappear — an increasingly acute threat in the face of more frequent and torrential climate-fueled hurricanes.
“After Katrina, the state did wake up and say ‘Oh shit, we used to have 90 miles of land mass between us and the Gulf of Mexico,’” said Eustis, who provides input on local industrial developments and wetlands restoration projects as community science director at the nonprofit Healthy Gulf. “‘Now, we have a bunch of swiss cheese.’”
So came a swell of legal efforts seeking to hold oil giants accountable for driving the collapse of Louisiana’s coast — including lawsuits brought by private landowners, a regional flood protection board, a local oil company, a Republican former governor, and local parishes, the state’s equivalent of counties.
Now, one of those cases is under consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, a state court jury found Chevron liable in a lawsuit brought by Plaquemines Parish, one of more than 40 parish lawsuits accusing oil companies of failing to secure permits for their operations and neglecting to clean up the damage they left behind in violation of state coastal management law. After the landmark verdict requiring Chevron to spend $745 million to restore the coast, the company appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in January.
In light of the industry’s successful lobbying for legislation limiting landowners’ lawsuits, parish lawsuits are an especially crucial avenue to hold the companies accountable, some local attorneys say. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the parishes and they continue to win their cases in state courts, they could make Chevron, Exxon, BP, Shell, and other oil companies pay billions of dollars to help fund coastal restoration efforts as the state runs out of resources to support cleanup.
That’s an outcome the companies are fighting to avoid. “Chevron is not the cause of the land loss occurring in Breton Sound,” Mike Phillips, the company’s lead attorney in the Plaquemines case, told outlets in April. Litigation “risks delaying collaborative action, misdirecting resources and inhibiting cross-sector work” to restore the coast, Shell claimed after the U.S. Supreme Court denied an earlier request by oil companies to stop Cameron Parish’s case from moving toward trial in state court. Shell and Apache have reached settlement agreements with the state in some cases, and ConocoPhillips is nearing a deal.
But internal company documents show oil giants knew that their practices were devastating coastal land, water, and habitats, and would eventually incur legal action — yet worked to delay cleanup and accountability for as long as possible.
The documents were obtained in the earlier landowner lawsuits during discovery, or the legal process of gathering evidence before a trial, and many were first reported on in a 2013 investigation by Harper’s Magazine. As the Supreme Court prepares to release a decision that could help determine Louisiana’s future, the story of what oil companies knew is worth revisiting.
“Do not admit blame”
The oil industry began issuing internal warnings about coastal operations nearly a hundred years ago. In 1932, a report written by V.L. Martin of the Prairie Oil & Gas Company, for a committee of the American Petroleum Institute, cautioned of the dangers of saline and sometimes carcinogenic oil production waste (or “brine”) leaking into the environment — and the likelihood of lawsuits to follow.
“It’s only a question of time until the opposition to the escape of our waste will become strong enough to force us, as an economical measure, to dispose of them in such a manner as will not be objectionable to anyone,” Martin wrote, adding that “we cannot escape the moral responsibility for the effect of such wastes.”
While the “field man is primarily concerned with the production of the maximum amount of oil at a minimum cost,” he wrote, “the cost of litigation” and “settlement of claims” might change that calculus.
Even though the companies were keenly aware of the potential for litigation over their waste-disposal practices in the future, they continued to dump brine in open pits and coastal marshes in Louisiana through the 1980s, state legal records and internal documents show.
In 1970, Humble Oil, which was later consolidated as part of ExxonMobil, sent out an internal company memo describing ways to prevent harm to personnel and the environment. The first instruction under a section titled “What to do when cited” reads “Do not admit blame: personally or on the part of the company.”
A 1980 report from Shell’s Division Safety and Environmental Conservation Manager labeled “Private” documented “flagrant violations of the law” at three of four facilities that were surveyed. The report describes those violations in detail, including intentional discharges of fluids and leaks from pit dikes leaking into nearby waters; standing oil in surrounding wetland areas that was never cleaned up; and oil byproducts from compressors being drained into wetlands.
In a memo four years later, a subsidiary of Shell once again sounded the alarm. “EPA has cleaned up some of these [oil field waste] pits at high costs to taxpayers, and evidence show[s] these pits have definitely contaminated soil and groundwater resources,” the memo reads. “Operators must begin to design and close pits properly or lawsuits will become a severe problem in the future.”
Despite the recent statements of fossil fuel defendants facing lawsuits, the industry’s own research pointed to its outsized responsibility. For instance, according to a 1989 study commissioned by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA), a trade group for oil and gas companies operating in Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, the effects of canal development to access well sites and for pipeline transport “tend to be the overwhelming cause of wetland losses.”
Keeping the law at bay
Rather than address the issues they were warned about, documents show the companies worked to weaken regulation of its coastal drilling operations and pushed legislation that would help shield them from liability for the fallout.
In a 1986 memo, Unocal, later acquired by Chevron, discussed its plan to stave off regulation and litigation that “can be expected in most cases where drinking water aquifers have become contaminated” from leaks and spills.
“Our environmental legislative and regulatory group, under Pat O’Toole, has been effective in tempering state bills and proposed regulations which would have increased clean-up and disposal costs,” its memo says. “Identified savings exceed some $20 million. This work continues, and future savings are anticipated.”
Two years earlier, a memo from Amoco (now BP) suggested that rather than backfilling old waste pits at a high cost to comply with regulations that would be implemented the following year, it could “donate” them to landowners, some of whom wanted to use them as duck or fish ponds.
“It is estimated that compliance with these new regulations will increase our pit cost by 50%,” reads the memo. “Donation of drilling pits will save Amoco the cost of backfilling and sampling and put these obligations on the landowner.”
Once the industry began to face the lawsuits they had predicted decades earlier, its lobbyists took to pressuring lawmakers to kill the suits before they could reach trial. LMOGA, the Louisiana oil industry association, pushed for the governor to sign a bill that aimed to effectively block a lawsuit brought against 97 oil and gas companies by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority (the case was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge). According to reporting by The Lens, a New Orleans-based nonprofit news site, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (LOGA), another industry lobbying group in the state, lobbied heavily for Act 312 — a 2006 law that placed state regulators in charge of overseeing cleanup in hundreds of “legacy lawsuits” brought by landowners against oil companies for soil and groundwater contamination on their properties.
Advocates and local lawyers say the law installed a bureaucratic maze controlled by the industry-friendly Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, helping insulate oil companies from the lawsuits. Under new legislation that will take effect September 2027, landowner lawsuits will be subject to even more restrictions.
“There’s been lies about this [coastal damage] my entire life,” said Eustis. “When the industry doesn’t want to follow your law, they buy your legislature.”
Exxon, Chevron, BP, API, and LMOGA did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Shell declined to comment.
‘Essential to any hope’ of Louisiana’s future
The changes come as the same oil companies and their allies in government mount a larger attack on lawsuits that could hold them accountable for climate damages — including Boulder’s climate lawsuit, which Exxon has brought before the U.S. Supreme Court. The industry is also lobbying for legislation that would shield its members from such lawsuits. Earlier this month, a Louisiana state lawmaker who has received thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry introduced a bill that would “limit liability for emissions of greenhouse gases” and “protect energy producers and related industries.”
In a brief in support of the companies’ arguments against the Plaquemines case, seven Republican attorneys general told the Supreme Court that “no matter the theory, the sought-after remedy” of climate and coastal damage lawsuits “is largely the same: the plaintiffs want to punish energy producers with crushing damage awards for activities that were concededly lawful (and often federally endorsed) at the time.”
Louisianans may see things differently. The parish lawsuits have enjoyed unique support from Louisiana officials who have been otherwise friendly to the industry, whose abandoned infrastructure is still causing damage along the coast. The state has a $50 billion coastal master plan set aside for rehabilitation, but the fund — much of which was supplied by a settlement with BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill — is running dry.
“The industry has just cut and run from all investment,” said Eustis. “They know they need to restore the wetlands, it’s just money that they don’t want to spend. But we’re really staring down the end of Louisiana, and restoring the land is essential to any hope of prosperity here.”
