Category Archives: oil pollution

BP Spill, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, natural resource management, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

Maritime Executive: NOAA Releases Millions of Chemical Analyses from Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

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http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/NOAA-Releases-Millions-of-Chemical-Analyses-from-Deepwater-Horizon-Oil-Spill-2013-09-12/

September 12, 2013

Includes data on underwater hydrocarbon plume, dispersants
BY MAREX

NOAA announced the release of a comprehensive, quality-controlled dataset that gives ready access to millions of chemical analyses and other data on the massive Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. The dataset, collected to support oil removal activities and assess the presence of dispersants, wraps up a three year process that began with the gathering of water samples and measurements by ships in the Gulf of Mexico during and after the oil release in 2010.

NOAA was one of the principal agencies responding to the Macondo well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, and is the official ocean data archivist for the federal government. While earlier versions of the data were made available during and shortly after the response, it took three years for NOAA employees and contractors to painstakingly catalog each piece of data into this final form.

This Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill dataset, including more than two million chemical analyses of sediment, tissue, water, and oil, as well as toxicity testing results and related documentation, is available to the public online at: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/deepwaterhorizon/specialcollections.html.

A companion dataset, including ocean temperature and salinity data, currents, preliminary chemical results and other properties collected and made available during the response can be found at: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/deepwaterhorizon/insitu.html.

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill response involved the collection of an enormous dataset. The underwater plume of hydrocarbon — a chemical compound that consists only of the elements carbon and hydrogen — was a unique feature of the spill, resulting from a combination of high-pressure discharge from the well near the seafloor and the underwater application of chemical dispersant to break up the oil.

“The size and scope of this project — the sheer number of ships and platforms collecting data, and the broad range of data types — was a real challenge. In the end, it was a great example of what can be accomplished when you bring together the expertise across NOAA, making this quality-controlled information easily available to the general public for the first time,” said Margarita Gregg, Ph. D., director of the National Oceanographic Data Center, which is part of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.

The effort to detect and track the plume was given to the Deepwater Horizon Response Subsurface Monitoring Unit (SMU), led by NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, and included responders from many federal and state agencies and British Petroleum (BP). Between May and November 2010, the SMU coordinated data collection from 24 ships on 129 cruises.

The SMU data archived at NOAA’s National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) is already being used by researchers at NOAA and in academia for a range of studies, including models of oil plume movement and investigations of subsurface oxygen anomalies. In addition to NODC, other parts of the NOAA archive system such as NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center and the NOAA Central Library contain important holdings. Recently, the library’s Deepwater Horizon Centralized Repository won recognition from the Department of Justice “as one of the best successes in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) world last year.”
By law, these data will remain available through NOAA’s archive systems for at least 75 years. Additional data from the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo spill can be found at the NOAA oil spill archive website: http://www.noaa.gov/deepwaterhorizon/ and data collected in the on-going Natural Resource Damages Assessment can be found at: http://www.gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, energy policy, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, national ocean politics, natural resource management, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

The Lens Opinion, Times-Picayune: Royalty-screwed: Big Oil likes to confuse severance taxes with cleanup costs

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Royalty-screwed: Big Oil likes to confuse severance taxes with cleanup costs

The Lens
Nola.com

OPINION By Mark Moseley, Opinion writer September 10, 2013 5:00pm

In August, Sen. Mary Landrieu argued that Louisiana deserves a greater share of oil royalty payments, maybe even rates equal to those received by mineral-rich states in the interior, such as Wyoming. With the additional proceeds from offshore production, Landrieu argues, the state can fund its urgent coastal restoration needs:

“Failure is no option. I don’t know if anybody knows where any other money is, but I don’t. If we do not get this [royalty] money, we cannot secure this coast and build the levees we need.”
In fact, Landrieu was well aware of another possible source of money. BP is about to be on the hook for a massive fines related to the 2010 oil spill, and Louisiana will use its share of those billions to jumpstart restoration projects.

Also, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Authority-East’s coastal erosion lawsuit against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies had been announced in July and – importantly- Landrieu signalled tentative support when she said, “I think we should seek justice everywhere we can find it.”

In 2006, Landrieu successfully shepherded legislation that, beginning in 2017, will increase Louisiana’s royalties from our vast offshore assets. Unfortunately, a $500 million cap prevented the act from being the coast’s saving grace. Landrieu wants to rectify that by removing the cap.

State coastal czar Garret Graves identified increased royalties as a prong in the state’s strategically sequenced tripartite coastal strategy. (It’s a complicated affair.) The other two prongs include BP oil spill money (natch), and “battling with the Army Corps of Engineers over its management of the Mississippi River.” It’s apparently a delicately balanced little stratagem, and Graves is hopping mad at the flood authority lawsuit because it has disturbed the Jindal administration’s priority sequence of coastal restoration funding mechanisms.

One thing is clear, though: The Jindal administration, the oil and gas lobby, and presumably the majority of the state Legislature are not thrilled by the flood authority’s lawsuit. They would prefer that the state’s $50 billion Master Plan to restore the coast be funded through an increased share of oil and gas royalties.

The royalty issue takes on increased importance in light of BP’s recent transformation from “contrite to combative.” Perhaps alarmed by increased potential expenses related to the oil spill, the once-apologetic oil giant has gone from vowing to “make things right” to basically mounting a PR campaign to say it is being victimized by fraudulent Louisianans. Thus it seems that BP will not be paying additional fines or judgements, without first exhausting all of its legal options. And that will likely mean years of delay.

So the royalty option assumes more importance. And this suits the oil and gas companies fine. Restoring the coast with oil and gas royalties gives the illusion that oil giants are paying to fix the coast that they helped to disappear (by slicing it apart with pipelines and navigation channels).
However, they’re not paying anything more than than they used to. Increasing royalties for Louisiana come out of the federal government’s share, not Big Oil’s coffers. It’s additional money for the state, and less for the federal budget.

Flood authority vice chairman John Barry explained in his masterful Lens op-ed:
The industry wants it [the coast] fixed, but they want taxpayers to pay for the damage they did, either in taxes or flood insurance rates. If we succeed in getting a bigger share of offshore revenue, we’re getting it from the federal treasury. From taxpayers in Rhode Island and Oregon – and in Louisiana. The industry won’t be paying a penny more.

This gets to the heart of the royalty dilemma. The rhetoric surrounding the argument Landrieu makes for increased royalties for Louisiana – “we deserve our fair share” and “we need this money to fix our coast” – subtly conflates two different issues.

Royalties, or more accurately, severance taxes, are compensation for the right to extract non-renewable mineral wealth. It’s for removing mineral assets, like oil, that can only be exploited once. Royalties are not a repair cost for extraction, or compensation for environmental impact.

Everyone who touts increased royalties as the smart play toward funding the coastal reconstruction Master Plan is misleading you. They are trying to link royalties and coastal restoration in the public’s mind, as a solution to the problem.

Don’t be misled. Louisiana’s fair share of the mineral wealth is one issue. If we should get a larger percentage of revenues – the same share interior states receive – that would be wonderful.

However, oil and gas companies’ responsibility for our coastal mega-problem is a separate issue. We would deserve increased royalties even if the coast was healthy and flourishing like it was a hundred years ago. As Barry says, Big Oil should pay more to fix the coast that they helped break. If the state acquires more royalty funds and directs them to restore the coast, instead of other urgent needs, that’s still a tremendous sacrifice.

Granted, the odds are long against the lawsuit being successful. Even if it were, oil and gas companies, like BP, will probably use every legal and political device at their disposal to avoid paying judgments promptly. So, increased royalties might become one of Louisiana’s last best politically feasible solutions to fund coastal restoration.

But don’t be fooled, if that’s how it plays out. Taxpayer’s will be paying for the destruction of our coast by the world’s richest corporate sector. Big Oil had a chance to step up, and instead they let the “little people” -as a BP exec once called us- take the hit.

I call that getting royalty-screwed.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, fossil fuels, marine pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

AP: Contracting issues delay legacy well cleanup in Arctic reserve

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http://www.adn.com/2013/09/10/3068057/contracting-issues-delay-cleanup.html

Published: September 10, 2013 Updated 1 hour ago

By BECKY BOHRER — Associated Press

JUNEAU, ALASKA — Contracting issues have delayed the start of planned cleanup work around abandoned well sites in the Alaska Arctic, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management said Tuesday.

In May, BLM-Alaska released a draft plan identifying 50 abandoned wells in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska that it believes require cleanup by the agency. The plan prioritized the remediation of the first 16 of those sites in the reserve. One of those sites — described as lying near a well-traveled winter road, with a building well known for providing shelter to travelers in poor weather — has a gas leak that the agency said could pose a threat to public health and safety.

The plan called for surface work at several sites southeast of Barrow to begin as early as this year, with cleanup of drums submerged in oil seeps and other debris. But Erin Curtis, a spokeswoman for BLM-Alaska, said that kind of work needs to be done in the summer. She said the contracting process can be lengthy and it will probably be next summer before that work begins.

She said there is no greater risk associated with the delay. The debris has been out there for a long time and will get frozen over during the winter, she said.

BLM manages the reserve, where more than 130 wells were drilled under the federal government’s direction as part of an exploratory oil and gas program from the 1940s to the 1980s. State leaders have pushed for progress on the cleanup and insisted it is a federal responsibility.

Curtis said the money for the initial surface work has been identified. But it’s not clear what the total cost to address the priority sites might be, and Curtis said additional work will be dependent upon funding.

Curtis said she expected the final version of the draft plan to be released soon. The initial hope was to have the plan finalized within weeks after the draft was released. But Curtis said it took a little longer than expected to get comments from interested parties. She characterized the comments BLM received as generally supportive of the top priorities the agency identified.

Cathy Foerster, a commissioner with the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission who has been critical of BLM’s handling of the legacy well issue, said she was encouraged that BLM was working with her group and others and taking their comments into account.

Foerster said she agrees with BLM on the highest-priority wells but worries that the agency doesn’t seem concerned about other sites. She remains concerned about the availability of funding and is taking a wait-and-see approach on any work that’s done.

“I won’t feel good until the work is done and I’ve seen how it’s done,” she said.

Curtis said the draft plan is meant to cover short-term issues. She said the intent is to look at additional sites once the highest-priority sites are addressed.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/09/10/3068057/contracting-issues-delay-cleanup.html#storylink=cpy

Lois N. Epstein, P.E.

Engineer & Arctic Program Director

The Wilderness Society

work: 907.272.9453, x107| cell: 907.748.0448

www.wilderness.org

Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheWildernessSociety

Twitter: twitter.com/Wilderness

We protect wilderness and inspire Americans to care for our wild places

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, offshore oil, oil pollution, Uncategorized

Energy & Environment: Regulator hopes Gulf mapping tool can defuse tension between drillers, fishermen

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Nathanial Gronewold, E&E reporter
Published: Thursday, September 5, 2013

HOUSTON — The federal government is racing to roll out a new mapping
tool that it hopes will lead to a truce between offshore drillers and
fishing interests over the spike in rig decommissioning and tear-downs.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement hopes by the end of
this month to have the basic framework for a geographic information
system mapping tool that would be used to track the life span of the
thousands of offshore structures and platforms standing in the Gulf of
Mexico, hundreds of which are slated for removal. But finalizing it
will take many more months or even years and will require the input of
charter fishermen, recreational diving companies, shrimp boat captains
and anyone else who has a stake in the Gulf’s natural resources.

The aim is to defuse the tension between charter fishermen and divers,
who depend on the artificial reef environments created by the rigs for
their livelihood, and the very owners of those offshore structures, who
are legally required to remove them when they are no longer in use. Rig
owners also fear the legal liability they are exposed to should a
defunct rig cause an accident or suffer storm damage.

In an interview, David Smith, a public affairs specialist at BSEE, said
the map that he and his team hope to complete this month will just be a
bare-bones version of the final product. The ultimate aim, he said, is
to develop a tool that enables all interested parties to know ahead of
time when a rig might be coming down and whether that structure would
be a good candidate for the federal Rigs to Reefs program.

BSEE sees Rigs to Reefs as the key to bridging the divide between the
fishermen and offshore oil and gas companies. Charter fishing interests
have been lobbying hard in Congress for a temporary moratorium on rig
decommissioning and removal, something that oil and gas companies and
the decommissioning industry are eager to avoid.

“You have the older platforms that have created this temporary
artificial habitat for fish and other marine life, but they’re also the
ones that are probably going to come out the soonest,” Smith explained.
“What we found is that there needs to be a lot more collaboration in
the planning process for decommissioning.”

Although the platforms, caissons and other offshore structures are the
private property of oil and gas companies, commercial and charter
fishermen insist that their voices should be added to the discussion on
what to do with an aging offshore structure. At the same time they and
some state agencies complain that the Rigs to Reefs program is too slow
and laden with bureaucracy. Six federal agencies have some say in what
happens to a structure resting above an abandoned offshore well.

Capt. Gary Jarvis, former president of the Corpus Christi, Texas-based
Charter Fishermen’s Association (CFA), expressed some skepticism that
BSEE’s planned reforms of Rigs to Reefs will work, but he is satisfied
that at least BSEE is hearing his industry’s concerns.

Still, he and others feel that nearly all offshore structures should be
reefed in place after they are no longer of use to the industry. That
currently happens with only a small fraction of them.

“Ideally for us, we would say reef them right where they’re at,” Jarvis
said. “That would be a good compromise.”

Delicate balancing act

Once the GIS map is in place, Smith said he hopes to organize a cross-
industry commission to help manage it and keep it updated.
Representatives of charter fishing and dive trip operators could
identify which structures are of most value to them, and oil and gas
interests across the table could provide updates on the status of these
structures, notifying whether they plan to tear them down and how
quickly.

Representatives of Gulf state agencies that assume responsibility for
artificial reefs created in Rigs to Reefs would also be at the table to
give guidance on whether these structures can be folded into the
program. Not all are eligible to become artificial reefs.

“We’re trying to develop a GIS map as a planning tool, and then we want
to develop a collaborative planning body that will sort of be an
information repository and facilitate a dialogue,” Smith said.

It’s a delicate balancing act that will attempt, for the first time, to
bring all Gulf of Mexico commercial interests — fishing, recreation,
and oil and gas — together to hash out compromises over their
competing needs.

Though charter fishermen may want to keep all structures in place,
shrimp boat captains by and large would like to see all those defunct
platforms removed to avoid damaging their equipment. Oil and gas firms
are keen to rid themselves of liability for these defunct platforms as
soon as possible. Meanwhile, thousands of workers are employed in the
Gulf Coast region by companies that tear down platforms and salvage the
“idle iron” for scrap metal.

The committee or planning commission that he hopes to form would “take
all of the input from the shrimping community, from the trawlers, from
the fishing and recreational charters, commercial diving community, all
of those different organizations and bring it all together, and then
have regular update meetings and have a place where people can come and
talk about what’s working and what’s not,” Smith said.

Complicating matters further, the science surrounding artificial
reefing is still in its infancy. The ecological benefits of artificial
versus natural reefs is still hotly debated and will be the principal
topic of discussion at the forthcoming Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries
Institute conference in Corpus Christi, Texas, slated for November.

Wes Tunnell, associate director of the Harte Research Institute at
Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, explained that the current debate
swirls around whether artificial reefs generate new populations of fish
species or simply concentrate existing ones. He said there is evidence
for both.

Gulf of Mexico researchers are also still trying to develop a sound,
standardized technique for studying and monitoring artificial reefs,
counting the populations of fish that call them home and comparing this
data with what researchers collect at natural reef sites. “There’s
never been a really good way to count the fish around these artificial
reefs and have kind of an objective method for doing that,” Tunnell
said.

But there is some general understanding of artificial reefs among the
scientific community. Tunnell indicated that there’s evidence to
suggest that, though natural reefs are more biodiverse, artificial
reefs may actually harbor larger numbers of fish and therefore might be
more productive for fisheries.

Harte and other research centers are willing to aid BSEE’s efforts to
reach a general compromise, but Tunnell said his institute’s position
on the decommissioning and Rigs to Reefs controversy will be strictly
neutral.

“We like to be what we call the honest broker,” he said. “We want to
keep providing the best information until we get to the right
solution.”

Hurricane’s wake

The hurricane seasons of 2005 to 2008 brought this issue to the fore.

Hundreds of platforms were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina,
Rita, Gustav and Ike. In investigating the problem, BSEE discovered
that more than half of the damaged structures were in disuse, sitting
abandoned for years. Fixing the damage cost hundreds of millions of
dollars.

The 2010 Macondo well blowout and oil spill delayed action somewhat,
but after the dust settled from that incident, BSEE issued a notice to
oil and gas companies reminding them that they need to demonstrate a
plan for what they intend to do with abandoned platforms within five
years. The options include selling them to other companies, reusing
them for developing new wells, reefing or removal.

Smith is adamant that the Notice to Lessees issued in October 2010 was
not a directive that companies must remove abandoned structures.
Rather, the notice was meant to remind industry of the existing
regulations in place.

Smith estimated that the Gulf is home to nearly 2,900 production
platforms, but he stressed that, of these, 700 to 800 may have to be
dealt with as they near the end of their life spans. And even then the
law doesn’t require that they be removed, only that the owners come up
with a plan for what to do with them next.

Still, many in the industry acted as if the NTL was ordering immediate
compliance.

BSEE estimates that 285 structures were removed from the Gulf in 2011,
up from 153 in 2008. Permit requests for rig decommissionings rose from
254 submitted in 2010 to 319 in 2011. Fishermen and divers grew alarmed
as hundreds of platforms were pulled, mostly from the western Gulf off
the coast of Texas. Structures that they’ve depended on for years
seemingly vanished overnight.

“Especially off South Texas where we are, we’ve just had so few rigs so
when they pulled out 30 or however many there were in our region, the
fishermen and the diving industry, they felt that tremendously,” said
Jennifer Wetz, a researcher at the Harte Institute. “That was huge to
them.”

The Charter Fishermen’s Association and other groups and individual
fishermen responded by getting politically active, pressing their local
members of Congress to get involved. Last year lawmakers proposed the
decommissioning moratorium. Although that effort failed, the speed and
strength with which fishing and diving interests acted got the
attention of offshore oil and gas firms. The dispute was a top item for
discussion among industry representatives at the Decommissioning and
Abandonment Summit held in Houston earlier this year.

J. Dale Shively, artificial reef program leader at the Texas Parks and
Wildlife Department, expressed sympathy for the fishing interests but
suggested they should have seen this problem coming. Offshore platforms
are meant to be temporary installations with their owners free to do
with them as they wish, as long as it complies with the law.

“One of the sticking points really is that the public doesn’t accept
that these platforms are private property,” Shively said. “They don’t
belong to the public. They don’t belong to the federal government or
the state. They belong to the oil company.”

CFA member Jarvis, however, argues that these structures become far
more than just a matter for the private owner because they create
valuable fish habitat, an asset that is tightly controlled throughout
the Gulf. Simply removing them when the companies want to would destroy
that habitat and the fish that reside there, an action that would
result in severe consequences for fishing interests but almost none for
oil and gas firms, he said.

“There are all kinds of federal laws and regulations about live coral,
and there’s nothing on those oil rig legs but live coral. They get a
free pass on that,” Jarvis said. “The fishing reefs, also known as oil
rigs, are a valuable asset to the fishery, not only from the
fisherman’s perspective but from the fish perspective too.”

Challenges

Shively agrees with BSEE that the Rigs to Reefs program will be a
central factor to satisfying all sides of the issue, but he complained
that for a while now the program allowed too little flexibility for
state agencies like his to grab structures before they are removed and
recommend them for reefing.

He also echoed Tunnell’s point that the science of artificial reefing
is still being worked out. Texas Parks and Wildlife is relying on
researchers at the Harte Institute; University of Texas, Brownsville;
and Texas A&M University, Galveston, for help in studying Texas’ three
primary artificial reef areas. Getting a fix on the value and proper
management of the Rigs to Reefs program is a never-ending challenge, he
said.

“We don’t ever predict that we’re done,” Shively said. “We put
materials down that are serving as a reef, but the scientific questions
are if you put more material, do you get more fish, or do you at some
point get all this competition and the population decreases because now
you’re bringing in more predators?”

Another challenge is the expense. Shively estimates that a typical
reefing job costs more than $500,000. A near-shore artificial reef he’s
working to put together this month near Corpus Christi using more than
400 concrete pillars will run about $700,000. Another near Matagorda,
spread across 160 acres, will probably cost $1.2 million to complete,
he said.

“Every reefing job is expensive,” Shively said. “We’re hoping to get
some of this Deepwater Horizon money to help with it. It’s in the
plans, but we haven’t gotten official approval yet.”

Though reefing can save an operator potentially millions of dollars,
the time-consuming and cumbersome process — and restrictions on where
and how rigs can be reefed — means that far more concrete and steel
will still be removed than left in the Gulf of Mexico. Last year BSEE
reported that the oil and gas industry requested approval to scrap
about 330 offshore structures. Twenty-seven were recommended for the
Rigs to Reefs program, or about 8 percent of the total. So far this
year the agency has received permit applications to scrap 121 rigs and
to reef 15.

The GIS mapping system that BSEE will try to roll out later this month
will be the beginning of attempts to bring more structure and order to
the Rigs to Reefs program and to provide fishermen and divers with
enough information so that they can know precisely what’s happening
with their favorite reefs. If such a structure is scheduled for
decommissioning, fishing and diving interests would be able to flag it
to state officials or BSEE for possible inclusion in Rigs to Reefs. If
popular structures are deemed unsuitable for reefing, then the divers
and fishers can at least learn of this ahead of time, giving them an
opportunity to seek out replacements to visit to keep their businesses
going.

Smith said he needs the cooperation of all sides to make the experiment
work.

“In order to get the map to work, we have to get all the BSEE data on
it, we need to get all the shrimping data on it, we need to get all the
fishing data on it,” he said. “It would help if the fishing and diving
community could point out those platforms that are really important to
them and make the states aware of those so that the states know where
to look for them.”

Though he thinks it’s been taking BSEE too long to put this mapping
tool together, Smith believes this step will prove to be the easy part
of this entire effort.

“The hard part is coming up with some sort of cooperative agreement or
something for a body to put all this stuff together,” he said. “I’m not
sure exactly how that’s going to happen yet. We’re still working on
that part.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, oil pollution

New York Times: Facing Fire Over Challenge to Louisiana’s Oil Industry

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Oh yeah, the good ol’ boys are angry now….so what do you think “secured” that gentlemen’s agreement? DV

August 31, 2013

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

BATON ROUGE, La. – State Senator Gerald Long of Louisiana calls it “kind of a gentlemen’s agreement.” For the generations since Mr. Long’s third cousin Huey P. Long was the governor, this state has relied on the oil and gas industry for a considerable part of its revenues and for tens of thousands of jobs. In return, the industry has largely found the state an obliging partner and staunch political ally as it has fought off curbs on its business.

Now, however, a panel of state appointees, created after Hurricane Katrina to be largely insulated from politics, showed just how insulated it was by upending the agreement.

In July, the panel, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, composed primarily of engineers and scientists charged with managing flood control for most of New Orleans and its suburbs, filed a lawsuit against nearly 100 oil and gas companies. The suit argues that these companies unlawfully neglected to fix decades’ worth of damage they caused to the state’s wetlands, thus making flooding from hurricanes more dangerous and flood protection vastly more expensive.

The reaction was swift. Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, immediately called the suit “nothing but a windfall for a handful of trial lawyers,” prompting local activists to highlight the $1 million he has received in donations from oil and gas interests. But at public meetings here and down on the bayou, the board has faced the displeasure of public officials largely alone.
At the meetings, the governor’s senior coastal adviser, Garret Graves, has strongly criticized the board as jeopardizing the broad coalition assembled to address coastal issues and needlessly complicating the state’s own efforts to find money for remediation. Other officials at public meetings have taken turns disparaging the board for seeking to penalize companies for activities decades old and, perhaps more than anything, acting without broad collaboration or political consent.

“You are not a state unto yourself,” State Senator Robert Adley said at a crowded legislative hearing, a rare occurrence in August. John M. Barry, a historian and writer who is the vice president of the flood panel, chalked the reaction up to politics, referring to an old saying that the flag of Texaco should fly atop the Louisiana Capitol.

It is true, at least, that the oil and gas industry’s connection with Louisiana runs deep. Industry executives – like Mr. Adley, who has run two different oil- and gas-related companies – sit in the Legislature, and former politicians lobby on the industry’s behalf. Several years ago, eight of the 16 judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, recused themselves because of perceived conflicts in a case involving the energy industry. But the connection goes beyond politics, into the state’s identity and culture. In 2010, many residents of south Louisiana were as outraged at the federal government for its moratorium on offshore drilling as they were at BP for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The industry – which has shifted away from conventional drilling to refining, fracking and petrochemical manufacturing – paid Louisiana $1.5 billion last year in royalties and taxes. Industry analyses say it accounts for, directly and indirectly, around 16 percent of the state’s work force.

While the energy industry has its complications, says Senator Long, a Republican, the arrangement on the whole has been a net positive for the state.

Other officials put it more strongly. “We’ve had a $10 million surplus every year I’ve been president of Plaquemines Parish because of oil and gas,” Billy Nungesser, who himself ran a $20 million business providing services to offshore rigs and platforms, said at one public meeting. “We can’t keep picking their pockets.”

But studies of the state’s catastrophic land loss in the past century – the disappearance of nearly 2,000 square miles of marsh serving as a crucial buffer against hurricanes – show that decades of oil and gas activity has come at a steep price. Dams and federally built levees holding back the replenishing sediment of the Mississippi River are main culprits in the land loss, but there is widespread agreement that the 10,000 miles of pipelines and canals cut into the marsh by oil companies are to blame as well. One widely cited study concludes that oil and gas activity accounts for 36 percent of the total loss.

No one anticipated a clash over these issues when civic activists and Chamber of Commerce groups urged an overhaul of New Orleans’s patronage-riddled levee boards in the months after Hurricane Katrina. These efforts, over staunch opposition, led to laws and amendments creating a regional flood protection authority with east and west branches. More critically, the laws established a less political appointment process, putting a premium on technical expertise. “It became a symbol of Louisiana willing to change its ways,” said Robert Scott, the president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, a good-government group.

Six years later, the experts in the east branch did something no one would have foreseen here. They voted unanimously to file the lawsuit against oil and gas companies. Citing regulations and permits requiring companies to restore what they had disrupted, the suit argues that the wetlands crisis is at least related to unlawful neglect.

Mr. Graves does not dispute that damage was caused by industry, but does deny that opposition to the suit is about politics. He said the state had worked for years to build a broad coalition, including environmentalists and representatives from oil companies, to finance and implement a $50 billion coastal master plan.

“There’s a bigger strategy that they’ve come in and really screwed up,” he said. Mr. Graves said the state was focused on three areas: attaining penalties and legal remedies from the BP spill, pushing legislation that would bring Louisiana a substantial share of offshore drilling royalties currently going into the federal treasury and battling with the Army Corps of Engineers over its management of the Mississippi River.

“You have to strategize, prioritize and sequence,” he said in an e-mail. Asked if the state’s strategy could conceivably involve litigation against energy companies for historical wetlands damage, Mr. Graves said that was “not our plan A, B, C, D or X.”
Mr. Barry said he fully supported holding the federal government accountable. But the cost of coastal protection is enormous and growing, he said, and he cannot see any way this lawsuit would interfere with these other efforts.

“All we’re trying to do is have a court decide whether we’re right or not, that they broke the law,” he said. “And if they broke the law, they need to fix the part of the problem that they created. It is so simple.”
For now, the suit’s chief obstacles may be political rather than legal.

The terms of four of the nine authority members are either expired or in limbo. And lawmakers are already planning to pass legislation next year to block the suit, possibly by taking away some of the authority’s powers.

“We’ll definitely do some legislation to try to decapitate this thing,” said State Senator Norby Chabert, a Republican.
State Representative Sam Jones, a Democrat, was on the same page.

“This House will probably not be punitive to the oil companies because, look, they’ve brought us thousands of jobs,” he said.
But the scope of opposition is unclear, as many politicians have remained conspicuously quiet. And in recent years, efforts by oil and gas interests to fight in the Legislature a wave of lawsuits by private landowners have met with significant resistance. Among residents along the coast, the crisis of the wetlands has complicated what were once straightforward arrangements.

“We need the gas and oil, but it’s clearly evident that there’s lasting damage in the marshes from the canals that they dug,” said Dave Cvitanovich, a lifelong oysterman. He spoke of the jobs the industry brought, but also of the broad stretches of water where there was land not that long ago.

On the lawsuit, he was still undecided. “It was a gutsy move, to say the least,” he said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter