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1 INTRODUCTION E nergy development and the Louisiana Gulf Coast have a shared history. The region is the birthplace of the offshore oil and gas industry. Throughout the twentieth century the energy industry transformed the Louisiana coast—an area dominated by 3 million acres of wetlands—into a corridor for transporting and processing oil and gas for the nation. Since the 1950s, Louisiana ’s coast has become a vital part of America’s energy security. Billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico have moved across Louisiana’s coastal wetlands through an intricate pipeline network. Today, roughly one quarter of America’s oil and gas resources flow through this system. Building and maintaining this energy infrastructure has been crucial to the economic prosperity of the region and the nation, but has also resulted in an unintended ecological consequence: coastal wetland loss. Long before Hurricane Katrina and the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill hit the region, efforts to protect and restore Louisiana’s imperiled coast had become one of the great environmental challenges of our time. This story highlights the tension between energy development and environmental protection. It provides valuable historical context for understanding the epic legal disputes against the oil and gas industry for extensive damages to the wetlands caused by digging pipeline canals. This book also places the Gulf Coast at the center of the debates on the future of energy and concerns over climate change. Louisiana’s wetlands are the most productive wetlands in America. This landscape provides nursery grounds for a billion-dollar-a-year seafood industry . Wetlands also provide the primary wintering grounds for North America’s migratory waterfowl. These marshes, swamps, bays, and barrier islands act as natural buffers against storm surges and absorb the shock of advancing Gulf hurricanes. Coastal Louisiana is also home to one of the nation’s most unique cultures. These wetlands are also vital to America’s energy needs. They anchor the pipeline infrastructure in place, protect the region’s oil and gas assets from AMERICAN ENERGY, IMPERILED COAST 2 the natural elements, and provide a conduit through which flows oil and gas supplies from the Gulf region and from tankers transporting petroleum from foreign nations. (See Map 1.) For decades, coastal Louisiana has been one of the fasting sinking wetland regions in the world. These wetlands account for roughly 40 percent of the nation’s wetland acreage and 80 percent of wetland loss in the United States. Since 1930, nearly two thousand square miles of Louisiana’s wetlands have been converted to open water. This loss is equal to an area the size of the state of Delaware . Natural subsidence, sea level rise, and powerful hurricanes have been some of the leading natural causes of coastal erosion during the last century. As land sank and sea levels increased, more salt water from the Gulf invaded coastal areas. Humans have also had their hands in this environmental calamity. In an effort to protect urban centers and commerce from major flooding events along the Mississippi River, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a levee and floodprotection system that cut off the region’s life supply of land-building sediments . Additionally, the thousands of miles of man-made canals, mostly built by the oil and gas industry and permitted by regulators, have opened up the marshes to salt water intrusion and drastically altered natural drainage flow, causing accelerated land loss across the coast. In order to design, fund, and implement large-scale ecological restoration in the region, while continuing to pursue critical energy development, policy makers, business and community leaders, and the general public need to understand the complex factors that make up coastal Louisiana’s energy and environmental past. American Energy, Imperiled Coast is an energy and environmental history of oil and gas development in the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The energy infrastructure built throughout the coastal region over the last century is vast. It includes re- fineries, ports, fabrication centers and shipyards, storage terminals, roadways, and petroleum production and processing facilities. This book focuses on the incredible growth of the pipelines built through the wetlands and the process by which this energy system evolved to become a dominant feature of the Louisiana coastal landscape. This transformation had consequences—some unintended— for the natural environment, the people of the Gulf, and the oil and gas industry . These consequences shaped the broader issues currently affecting the Gulf Coast, from economic and...

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