Building America’s First Offshore Oil
Port: loop
Jason Theriot
The 1970s marked a turning point in the history of oil in the United States when two
national imperatives—the need to increase energy supplies and the desire to protect the
environment—collided. Plans to build the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (loop) to carry
foreign crude oil supplies offloaded in the Gulf of Mexico and pumped through a
seventy-five mile pipeline corridor across the Louisiana wetlands to shore centered on
these two competing priorities. loop addressed the urgent need to accommodate expanding
volumes of imported crude oil, while at the same time recognizing that wetlands were a
valuable resource that needed to be protected rather than exploited. loop was the first
major facility in the Gulf of Mexico that included environmental scientists and environmental planning in its overall design, construction, and operation. Scientific knowledge
outside of the oil industry thus reoriented the ways American society valued wetlands and
shaped the development of America’s first and only offshore oil port.
Throughout the twentieth century, the oil and gas industry transformed the Louisiana
Gulf Coast—an area dominated by more than 5 million acres of wetlands—into a
corridor for national energy production and delivery.1 Billions of barrels of oil and
trillions of cubic feet of natural gas have been produced onshore and offshore and transported across Louisiana’s tidal marshlands through an intricate network of pipelines.
These pipelines today handle roughly one quarter of the nation’s petroleum supplies.
loop—originally built as a terminal for unloading supertankers offshore—connects to
this existing pipeline infrastructure and provides a critical link between American energy
consumers and global oil supplies. Since the mid-1990s, loop has also been an important
pipeline link for bringing in domestic oil production from the deepwater (greater than
1,000-foot depths) Gulf of Mexico.
loop represented a departure from an earlier era when the industry and its permitting
authorities viewed the wetland environment as a hazard to be overcome. With national
environmental reforms and new cultural attitudes in the 1970s, industrial developers in
environmentally sensitive areas such as the Louisiana wetlands and the Alaskan tundra for
Jason Theriot is a postdoctoral fellow at the Consortium for Energy Policy Research at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University. He would like to thank those individuals who provided editorial comments,
especially Tyler Priest and Bruce Beaubouef.
Readers may contact Theriot at [email protected].
1
The material for this essay originated from the author’s dissertation research. Jason Theriot, “Building
America’s Energy Corridor: Oil and Gas Development and Louisiana’s Wetlands (Ph.D. diss., University of
Houston, 2011).
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas074
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
June 2012
The Journal of American History
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the first time had to consider and minimize environmental impacts. In the case of loop,
coastal scientists and environmental concerns influenced decisions about ways to incorporate environmental safeguards into the project. These ideas were built into all phases of
loop and led to a more environmentally sound and safer facility. Similar to the highly
publicized Trans Alaska Pipeline System (taps)—another 1970s megaproject—loop was
a product of the environmental movement and the energy crisis.
In many ways, the concerns over energy and the environment in the 1970s mirror
those over the present-day Gulf of Mexico. The 2010 Macondo well blowout and the
resulting oil spill has brought into sharp focus two current national imperatives: how to
expand domestic petroleum production from the deepwater Gulf while also protecting
and restoring a nationally important ecosystem. As it did in the 1970s, the scientific community may again provide critical solutions to the ongoing technical, regulatory, and
environmental problems affecting America’s offshore oil and gas industry.
Building a Coastal Pipeline Corridor
Coastal Louisiana is laced with petroleum pipelines. The maze of long, linear canals
dredged throughout the wetlands to support these pipelines radically altered the physical
environment. In the 1950s, at the dawn of the offshore oil boom, James McConnell,
commissioner of the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Agency, recognized the rapid
changes occurring in the wetlands: “One does not have to be an expert to fly over our
coast and see how drastically industrial expansion has changed the characteristics and
ecology of the coast.”2 Not until the 1970s, however, did scientists begin really to
understand the relationship between these canals and environmental decline in the
wetlands.
The petroleum industry began searching for oil-bearing salt domes in southern Louisiana
before World War II. The most prolific oil fields were discovered not in the upland
prairies or pastures, but in the vast marshes, swamps, and shallow bays along the coastline.
Eventually, the industry migrated to the open waters of the Gulf in search of oil deposits
offshore. At each step, changing environmental conditions influenced the choices of
technologies.3 For example, pipeliners first applied traditional dryland equipment and
techniques for laying pipelines along the coast, often with limited success. As the industry
pushed into the soggy Mississippi delta region, pipeliners came up with innovative
and cost-effective techniques for laying bigger and heavier pipelines through extremely
difficult marsh terrain.
In the 1940s and 1950s the use of barge-mounted equipment in dredged canals
emerged as the most widely accepted technological adaptation for operations in Louisiana’s
vast coastal wetlands. Without regulatory oversight to govern dredging activities or the
incentive to implement less environmentally destructive techniques, this choice of technology became the industry standard for decades. By installing traditional pipe-laying
equipment on floating steel barges, pipeline companies were able to create specially
designed “lay barges” that allowed for continuous pipe-laying operations under marine
James N. McConnell, “Oil and Oysters,” Louisiana Conservation Review, 8 (Oct. 1956), 5.
The idea that technological and environmental change in history is interdependent is the basis of a new field
of scholarship called Envirotech. See Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, eds., The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (Charlottesville, 2010).
2
3
Building America’s First Offshore Oil Port
189
conditions. To provide access for these lay barges and other drilling and production
equipment to move unimpeded through the region, the industry dug thousands of miles
of canals across the marshland. Large land corporations that owned most of the coastal
marsh and state and federal regulatory agencies supported the canalization of the
wetlands and required few, if any, restrictions on industry development. These activities
occurred during a time when most people viewed wetlands as wastelands. The concerns
of a few fishermen, trappers, and conservationists about possible long-term adverse
ecological effects of these practices were ignored as the industry carved its way to the edge
of the Gulf and offshore. Dredging canals and creating mounds of spoil banks across the
marsh were viewed as the price for economic development.
This pipeline and canal network set the foundation for establishing a nationally important energy corridor during the postwar decades. As offshore development expanded, the
number of canals dredged through the wetlands to accommodate the pipelines and offshore production increased. With each major oil discovery offshore, submarine pipelines
were laid from a central gathering facility near the new field back to shore to transport
petroleum supplies to processing facilities and eventually to markets. By the 1970s the
industry had built approximately 145 major pipelines and countless feeder lines through
the marshlands and barrier islands of coastal Louisiana to service the booming offshore
industry.4 The traditional practice of laying large pipelines across the marsh, however,
came under closer public scrutiny as evidence of the impact of pipeline canals on land loss
began to surface.
At the Intersection of the Energy Crisis and Environmental Reform
The gathering strength of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and three
major offshore oil disasters during 1969 and 1970 raised questions about expanding
offshore energy development near coastal areas. The old days of “engineering on the run”
that characterized rudimentary planning by both industry and government regulators
had produced unacceptable environmental damages. The National Environmental
Policy Act of 1969 required an environmental impact statement (eis) for all projects
on federal lands, including the Gulf of Mexico. The statements were required to assess
the potential environmental impacts of the activity and other alternatives that might
lessen any adverse effects. They became a powerful environmental planning tool for
industry and government that redefined the ways both sectors approached new projects
offshore.5
The environmental reforms that accompanied the shift in public attitudes coincided
with new evidence from coastal scientists that showed Louisiana’s wetlands disappearing
at an alarming rate. These scientists discovered that cumulative and long-term effects of
dredging thousands of miles of man-made canals throughout coastal Louisiana led
to salt water intrusion into the marsh and disrupted natural drainage patterns that
4
Karen M. Wicker et al., Pipelines, Navigation Channels, and Facilities in Sensitive Coastal Habitats: Coastal Gulf
of Mexico, vol. 1: Technical Narrative (New Orleans, 1989), chap. 8, secs. 5, 9.
5
The nation’s first major oil spills offshore were: (1) Union Oil Company, Santa Barbara channel, California, in
1969; (2) Chevron Oil Company, Main Pass, Louisiana, in 1970; and (3) Shell Oil Company, Bay Marchand,
Louisiana, in 1970. For a history of the National Environmental Policy Act, see Richard N. L. Andrews, Managing
the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy (New Haven, 2006).
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contributed to coastal land loss. Any new pipeline developments going forward would
have to be cognizant of these new environmental concerns.6
In the early 1970s a consortium of oil companies (Ashland Oil Company, Marathon Oil
Company, Murphy Oil Corporation, Shell Oil Company, and Texaco) and the state of
Louisiana initiated plans to build the nation’s first deepwater oil port to accommodate increasingly massive ocean-going oil tankers—“very large crude carriers”—from the Middle East
that were too large for any American port. The loop concept centered on a series of floating mooring systems located twenty miles offshore. Supertankers would tie up to these
offloading terminals and discharge their crude cargo through a large pipeline system that
extended inland. Then, millions of gallons of oil traveled by pipeline several miles across coastal
wetlands and fed into a hollowed-out underground salt dome for storage prior to distribution
to regional and national refineries. With the energy infrastructure and refineries already well
established along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, political and business leaders from the Pelican
State began a campaign to beat out other states to build the nation’s first deepwater port.7
In 1972 the state legislature laid the foundation for the oil port with the passage of the
Louisiana Deep Draft Harbor and Terminal Authority Act. This created the Superport
Authority, tasked with laying the groundwork for the legal, technical, and environmental
aspects of designing and licensing the new port. That same year, a consortium of major oil
companies incorporated loop, llc, to build, own, and operate the oil port. The legislation
also called for an environmental protection plan (epp) to build in environmental safeguards.
This requirement was intended to minimize damages to the environment and to limit the
role of outside federal regulators in developing the port. With planning guidelines similar
to a federal eis, Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards and state politicians argued successfully
throughout the 1970s for the right to license, build, and control loop. In addition, this
historic legislation initiated the four-volume Louisiana Superport Studies, the first of many
technical and environmental evaluations that developers and regulators used to make decisions throughout the various planning phases of the project. Coastal scientists at the Center
for Wetland Resources at Louisiana State University (lsu) conducted the environmental
research for these studies, which in turn had a large influence on how the project evolved.8
loop’s Environmental Protection Plan
loop planners and policy makers acknowledged the important role that the scientific
community had to play in building the port. In the early 1970s a handful of young
6
In 1970, scientists at Louisiana State University released a report indicating that Louisiana had lost an estimated 16.5 square miles of wetlands per year since the 1930s. See Johannes L. Van Beek and Sherwood M. Gagliano,
Hydrologic and Geologic Studies of Coastal Louisiana, report no.1: Geologic and Geomorphic Aspects of Deltaic Processes,
Mississippi Delta System (Baton Rouge, 1970). Early works on the impact of canals are Sherwood M. Gagliano,
Canals, Dredging, and Land Reclamation in the Louisiana Coastal Zone (Baton Rouge, 1973); Lyle S. St. Amant, “The
Petroleum Industry as It Affects Marine and Estuarine Ecology,” Journal of Petroleum Technology, 24 (April 1972), 385–
92; and N. J. Craig, R. E. Turner and J. W. Day Jr., “Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana,” Environmental Management,
3 (no. 2, 1979), 133–44.
7
The idea for an offshore superport began as early as 1970. See “Superport in Gulf Proposed by Dreamers,”
Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate, July 26, 1970. Texas was the only other state besides Louisiana that proposed building
an offshore oil port.
8
Louisiana Deep Draft Harbor and Terminal Authority Act, La. Rev. Stat. 34 sec. 3101 (1972). P. J. Mills, “The
Louisiana Superport Authority: Its History and Its Future,” May 6–8, 1974, Offshore Technology Conference,
conference paper no. 2096, available at http://www.onepetro.org; William B. Read, loop: The First and Only Offshore Deepwater Oil Port Built in the United States (Bloomington, 2007).
Building America’s First Offshore Oil Port
191
ecologists joined a team of well-established geologists and geographers at lsu. Combined
with funding from a newly established Louisiana Sea Grant program, this core group
of scientists brought to the public’s attention the myriad environmental problems—
especially coastal erosion—threatening Louisiana’s wetlands. Their studies and research
methodologies influenced the design and construction of loop, the planning for the
Louisiana Coastal Zone Management Program, and future coastal restoration efforts.
These environmental experts were consulted throughout the development of loop to
ensure that potential environmental impacts would be carefully researched and that the
plans met optimum environmental goals outlined in the legislation. The coordination
between environmental consultants and loop engineers represented a “new approach to
a project of this magnitude,” according to the Superport Authority.9
Louisiana Superport Studies became the basis of environmental research into the
planned development and legislative policy regarding the loop facility. The reports in the
study stressed the importance of recognizing the onshore impacts of offshore development. These comprehensive reports collected baseline environmental data on the region
before construction began to determine potential impacts. They provided recommendations on site selection and on improved technology and techniques for building the pipeline system through the wetlands. The last two volumes of the series led to the formulation
of the epp.10
The final epp, drafted by a panel of three directors—two of whom came from the field
of environmental science—provided the design criteria and operating procedures used by
planners, regulators, engineers, and contractors during loop’s site selection, construction,
and operational phases. The plan identified a number of potential environmental stresses
associated with the oil port, including damages to coastal marshes and estuaries from
tanker spills, pipeline construction, and other industry activities. Data retrieved from
previous offshore oil spills in the Gulf and from research on loop’s preferred offshore
location south of Lafourche Parish recognized the presence of a clockwise loop current in
the central Gulf (a major concern during the 2010 oil spill from the Macondo well blowout). Models predicted the trajectory of an oil spill at the loop site within this particular
current to reach the ecologically productive Barataria estuary along the coast. Scientific
assessment convinced the developers to move the offshore terminal five miles to the
southwest and away from this current, thus minimizing the threat to these important
wetlands from a potential oil spill.11
9
“Long Answers Environmental Questions on Superport,” Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, Oct. 12, 1972. Throughout the development of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, Louisiana created and implemented its own coastal zone
management program, which the federal statute on deepwater oil ports required from states that wished to build these
facilities. The Louisiana Coastal Resources Program, established in 1980, became the state’s regulatory and permitting
authority for coastal activities. It was through this regulatory program that Louisiana began phasing out the practice of
dredging large pipeline canals through the fragile marshes and across barrier islands. On the coastal zone management
program, see Louisiana Coastal Resources Program, Final Environmental Impact Statement (Washington, 1980).
10
The complete series is James H. Stone, Louisiana Superport Studies, report I: Preliminary Recommendations and
Data Analysis (Baton Rouge, 1972); James H. Stone, Louisiana Superport Studies, report II: Preliminary Assessments
of the Environmental Impact of a Superport on the Southeastern Coastal Area of Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1972); James
H. Stone, Louisiana Superport Studies, report III: Recommendations for the Environmental Protection Plan (Baton
Rouge, 1973); and David B. Johnson, Louisiana Superport Studies, report IV: Technical Appendices to Recommendations for the Environmental Protection Plan (Baton Rouge, 1974).
11
Louisiana Superport Authority, Environmental Protection Plan of the Offshore Terminal Authority (Baton
Rouge, 1975), chap. 2, sec. 2, Superport application documents folder, Louisiana Collection (Louisiana State
Library, Baton Rouge). On the decision to move the facility outside of the current, see Charles E. Sasser et al.,
“Environmental Management Analysis of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port,” Wetlands, 2 (no. 1, 1982), 249–61.
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The environmental analysis determined that the proposed large-diameter onshore
pipeline system would disrupt more than 1,500 acres of prime wetlands. This pipeline
and its dredged canal crossed through the entire estuarine range of coastal marsh. Canals
served as conduits for salt water intrusion from the Gulf that destroyed fresh water habitats
inland and converted marshes to open water. Coastal scientists warned of the importance
in maintaining those various salinity regimes, hydrological patterns, and habitat conditions. In an effort to respond to these concerns, loop planners, with consultation from
environmental scientists and environmental engineers, proposed using an alternative
construction technique and backfilling the pipeline canal—a novel concept that had
long been considered economically unfeasible and unnecessary by the industry and large
landowners. Lyle S. St. Amant, a fisheries biologist and one of the three principal authors
of the epp, acknowledged the benefit of this new pipeline installation method: “We feel
rather certain that it will not cause any problems and it may, indeed, be an answer to the
pipeline problem on the Coast.”12
From a historical perspective, loop’s epp was clearly a departure in environmental
planning, operational criteria, and strict performance standards for oil developments
along the Gulf Coast. The plan strongly emphasized identifying and compensating for the
environmental costs of the project. It called for an initial environmental values assessment
of the areas expected to be impacted, followed by the application of “economic-ecologic”
formulas—developed largely by academic consultants—to determine the cost-benefit
analysis of building loop at alternative sites along the coast. This idea of translating
environmental values into economic terms for planning a major pipeline project reflected
the shift in attitudes and emphasis on ecological values championed by scholars and advocates of the environmental age. Ian McHarg, the author of the influential book Design
with Nature (1969), first promoted the idea of incorporating social and natural values
into the cost-benefit analysis of project development; he argued that each construction
project should have increased total ecological value over total ecological costs. A final
requirement of loop’s epp established the procedures for an environmental protection
fund to be used to pay for a long-term monitoring program and to compensate for environmental impact, through payments to the proper state officials.13
loop received its fair share of criticism from the scientific community and from environmentalists. Early on, coastal scientists spoke out in favor of a site closer to the Mississippi delta. They believed that a major oil spill from the loop terminal offshore in an area
known as Bay Marchand could be disastrous to the estuaries and fishing communities
near Grand Isle. A dispute erupted between academics and industrialists when a leading
coastal scientist publically challenged loop’s preferred site location. The following year, an
outside engineering firm conducted a thorough alternative site selection analysis for loop.
Of the three primary alternative sites, the report recommended the original Lafourche–
Bay Marchand area as optimum. The consultants, and loop’s planners, based the final site
selection on a combination of environmental and economic considerations. The preferred
12
Johnson, Louisiana Superport Studies, IV, 96. Lyle S. St. Amant quoted in U.S. Coast Guard, “Stenographic
Transcript of Hearings, Deep Water Port License Application,” May 25, 1976, Louisiana Collection.
13
On the economic-ecological formula requirement, see Louisiana Superport Authority, Environmental Protection
Plan of the Offshore Terminal Authority, chap. 3, sec. 15. On the protection fund requirement, see ibid., chap. 1, secs.
15–21. For an overview of the Environmental Protection Plan, see Emmet F. Spencer et al., “The State
of Louisiana Superport Authority Environmental Protection Plan—Oil and Oysters,” Water Resources Bulletin,
2 (Aug. 1975), 836–47. Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (New York, 1969).
Building America’s First Offshore Oil Port
193
location represented the shortest route to the Capline pipeline, the nation’s main interstate crude line that ran from the Gulf Coast to refineries in the Midwest and the midAtlantic region. loop’s distribution also connected to the nearby Clovelly underground
storage area, which eliminated the need for large, less secure, above-ground tank farms to
store the crude. The Sierra Club, along with some coastal scientists, however, lambasted
the planners of loop for ignoring potential alternative sites in favor of the prearranged
and least costly route to Capline, which members of the loop consortium also owned and
operated.14
A similar experience occurred in Alaska, where stakeholders fought for several years
over the eight-hundred-mile pipeline through one of America’s last great wilderness areas.
The historical similarities between loop and taps are striking, given that both were the
first major oil pipeline projects built under new federal environmental reforms and that
both occurred in extremely environmentally sensitive areas. The original 1969 plan for
taps called for a large oil pipeline to be buried under the Alaskan permafrost for transporting new reserves discovered in Prudhoe Bay to a tanker terminal at the port of Valdez.
taps developers encountered a similar set of new environmental standards and scientific
evaluations that, like those for loop, influenced technological choices, project designs,
and regulatory response. A major problem occurred with burying a hot oil pipeline
underground. Scientists acknowledged that a sharp change in temperature below the surface could cause the permafrost to thaw in the spring, thus resulting in a heaving effect
during the winter that could force the pipeline upward. This exposure could cause erosion,
damage to wildlife—or worse, a massive oil spill. These kinds of independent scientific
investigations led to improved design modifications, including elevating the pipeline high
above the tundra. Similarly to critics of loop, opponents of taps strongly criticized the
regulators and the industry for not adequately investigating or considering an alternative
route through Canada, which would have eliminated the need for a tanker terminal in
Valdez. Nevertheless, many critics agreed that the implementation of the environmental
impact statement requirement and the four-year delay in conducting the environmental
studies produced a safer, more environmentally sound pipeline than originally proposed.15
The level of scientific research that went into formulating loop’s Environmental
Protection Plan cost several million dollars and probably delayed the project by several
years. The benefits of incorporating science into the planning, however, were clearly
displayed in loop’s environmental record. The offshore oil port did not suffer a major oil
spill, nor did the brine disposal process used to hollow out the Clovelly salt dome storage
area significantly impact fisheries. Four years after construction, researchers conducted a
study of loop’s controversial pipeline canal. They determined that the canal actually
showed signs of revegetation in some areas, primarily as a result of backfilling and using a
modified pipeline installation method.16 With built-in environmental safeguards and
improved techniques for pipeline construction through the marshes, loop planners and
14
“Alternate Port Site Report Draws Fire,” Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, Sept. 19, 1973; Dames & Moore,
Inc., Alternative Site Location Evaluation for Louisiana Offshore Oil Port Inc. (Atlanta, 1975), Superport application
documents, Louisiana Collection. For comments on the proposed Superport license application, including those
from the Sierra Club, see Deepwater Ports Project, Final Environmental Impact Statement for the loop Deepwater Port
License Application (4 vols., Washington, 1976), IV, E-131.
15
See Peter A. Coates, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation, and the Frontier
(Fairbanks, 1993).
16
Robert K Abernethy and James G. Gosselink, “Environmental Conditions of a Backfilled Pipeline Canal
Four Years after Construction,” Wetlands, 8 (Dec. 1988), 109–21.
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their scientific advisers achieved an important advance in energy development along
coastal Louisiana.
When loop opened in 1981, following two years of construction, the developers
had spent more than $700 million on a state-of-the-art facility. loop’s capacity to offload
1.4 million barrels of oil per day represented more than the total daily production of the
Gulf of Mexico during that time. Throughout its first years of operation, however, loop
struggled to maintain a profit. The glut in global oil markets in the early 1980s caused a
sharp drop in oil prices and a decline in oil imports. As a result of this oil bust, loop had
fewer supertankers calling to port and a lower volume of oil throughput than originally
anticipated. As consumption rose and imports increased, loop’s revenues gradually
improved. By the 1990s the offshore oil port accounted for roughly 12 percent of the
nation’s foreign crude imports.17
loop in the “Deepwater” Era
The offshore oil and gas industry in the Gulf experienced a transition during the last two
decades of the twentieth century. Declining production from the continental shelf pushed
the oil companies past the one-thousand-foot depth in the Gulf in search of new supplies
to feed America’s growing energy demands. Large reserves of petroleum had been discovered in this new frontier, but bringing these supplies to shore posed a major logistical and
environmental problem. Dredging long linear canals through the wetlands to lay heavy
pipelines from offshore, as the industry had done for decades, was no longer viewed as an
appropriate practice. Oil companies turned to loop, with its existing pipeline corridor,
underground storage capacity, and proper environmental safeguards, as a way to bring
these supplies ashore and limit environmental impacts. loop provided an important link
for these new sources of domestic production from the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. It also
averted a potentially environmentally destructive expansion of the pipeline network to
accommodate new deepwater developments.
In the mid-1990s, more generous federal lease terms, new technologies, and recordbreaking oil discoveries ushered in a new era of deepwater exploration and production
that is still ongoing. In response, loop diversified its business plan to provide transportation and storage facilities for major oil companies such as Shell and BP that helped them
expand into deep water at the turn of the twenty-first century. The passage of the Deepwater Port Modernization Act of 1996 confirmed loop’s statutory authority to receive
oil from the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. In 1995 loop signed a deal with Shell to bring
in more than one hundred thousand barrels of oil per day from the Mars field, one of the
largest discoveries ever made in the Gulf of Mexico, and a key development in the history of deepwater oil. loop also provided an outlet for BP’s Thunderhorse deepwater
production through the Endymion Oil Pipeline Company and the Mardi Gras Transportation System, one of the largest deepwater pipeline gathering systems in the Gulf.
Compared to taps, where a decline in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay field has led to a decline
in the pipeline’s capacity and raised questions about its future, loop has consistently
found new outlets for its transportation and storage capacity. By extending
its pipeline services to other sectors, the Louisiana oil port has—unlike its Alaskan
17
Mary Judice, “Out of the loop,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, Sept. 17, 1995, p. F1.
Building America’s First Offshore Oil Port
195
counterpart—found solutions to the problem of infrastructural inertia, where high
fixed-cost commodity transport systems must seek new sources of revenue, thus compelling the expansion of frontier extraction. With its direct link to deepwater production,
loop will continue to play an important role in expanding America’s domestic oil supplies
for decades to come.18
Additionally, loop helped launch Port Fourchon, the nation’s premier logistical support center for servicing the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Selected as the location for loop’s
beach crossing and onshore pumping station, Port Fourchon, a former fishing dock, grew
rapidly to become a major port facility with more than a hundred tenants, mostly in the
marine transportation industry. Today, Port Fourchon services more than 75 percent of
all deepwater exploration and production and over half of the drilling rigs in the Gulf of
Mexico. By the turn of the twenty-first century, loop had become a key transport node
for both increased oil imports and expanded domestic oil production offshore, thus
reshaping oil developments in the larger Gulf Coast region.
loop and the Crisis of Coastal Land Loss
Despite improvements in designs and development activities, loop’s environmental
achievements did not silence those concerned with bigger problems affecting the coast. If
anything, loop helped broaden these coastal issues for a larger public audience at the state
and federal levels. The scale of scientific involvement in project planning and the vast
amount of useful data produced from this collaborative effort signaled the beginning of a
major new initiative to address Louisiana’s problem with shrinking wetlands. The crisis of
coastal land loss that intensified during the 1980s and 1990s and the efforts to protect
and restore Louisiana wetlands have come to define recent energy and environmental
history of the Gulf Coast.
Since the 1930s coastal Louisiana has lost approximately 1 million acres of wetlands—
an area greater than the size of Rhode Island. Over the last several decades, in the wake of
this environmental crisis, oil-field canals have become one of the most controversial issues
in the region. Scientists have made it clear that canals are one of a variety of factors leading to wetland loss, but quantifying these effects have been difficult. Four decades of
extensive scientific research into the complex environmental problems associated with
energy production along the Gulf Coast have led to improvements in technology and
environmental management. The science—and scientists—that guided the environmental planning for loop in the 1970s helped bring about significant structural changes in
energy and environmental policies in coastal Louisiana and laid the foundation for a
major wetland restoration effort still underway.19
18
Deepwater Port Modernization Act of 1996, H.R. 2940, 104th Cong. (1996). For information on Shell Oil
Company and the Mars field, see Dan Godfrey interview by Tyler Priest and Jason Theriot, June 9, 2009, transcript, Oral
History of Houston Collection (Houston History Archives, M. D. Anderson Library, University of Houston, Tex.);
Tyler Priest, The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America (College Station, 2008),
255–57. Robert Marshall and William McDonald, “Mardi Gras Transportation System Overview,” May 3–6, 2004,
Offshore Technology Conference, conference paper no. 16637-MS, available at http://www.onepetro.org.
19
The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, No Time to Lose: Facing the Future of Louisiana and the Crisis of
Coastal Land Loss (Baton Rouge, 2000), 2. For a historical account of the debate over canals and land loss, see Tyler
Priest and Jason Theriot, “Who Destroyed the Marsh?: Oil Field Canals, Coastal Ecology, and the Debate over
Louisiana’s Shrinking Wetlands,” Economic History Yearbook, 50 (no. 2, 2009), 69–80.
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Recent events in the Gulf served as a stark reminder of the tension that underlies oil
and gas development and environmental safety. Expanding development in deep water
under new safety and performance standards while also protecting and restoring the
coastal environment are key current issues that echo similar concerns from the past. The
imperative to balance national energy security with environmental protection will
continue to inform decisions about offshore oil and gas development. The scenes of
oil-soaked pelicans—the Louisiana state bird—and devastated marshlands and beaches as
a result of the Macondo oil spill presented to the rest of the nation and the world
a glimpse of the real environmental and human costs of energy development along the
Gulf Coast.
The stakeholders in the Gulf region are at a critical impasse. The decisions being made
in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon fire and spill will have long-term consequences for energy development and coastal restoration. The importance of scientific
input into the political process that will govern the future of the Gulf cannot be overlooked. A history of loop provides a lesson for future approaches to managing oil and gas
development and environmental protection along this vital energy corridor. In the case of
loop, the strong environmental safeguards adopted at the outset have enabled the facility’s
owners to lay claim to one of the best safety records in the industry.
The challenges of the 1970s to develop more sources of petroleum with less environmental impact called for a level of environmental planning that had never before been
attempted in coastal and offshore Louisiana. To meet these expectations, the planners of
loop had to rely on environmental consultants—many of them from universities—to
provide the expertise on coastal processes, marsh ecology, salinity levels, and offshore
currents. Understanding how this complex environmental system worked became a key
factor in determining the proper technologies and procedures necessary to build a major
oil port within a fragile ecosystem. Lessons from the 1970s teach us that energy development and sound environmental management practices can coexist. The challenge since
then has been—and certainly will be, looking into the future—to bring together advances
in environmental planning with novel energy innovations.