Unraveling Coast

Oil and gas extraction in Louisiana's Gulf Coast has triggered multiple ecological crises, including one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the world. Over the past century, 2,000 square miles of wetland have been lost...

But who lost them? Scroll to find out
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Unraveling Industry

We can locate the corporations responsible and make a case for accountability by mapping well, canal, and pipeline permits issued by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (LDNR) throughout Louisiana's coastal zone.

Each dot represents a permit for a well.

Each line represents a permit for a pipeline, flowline, or access canal.

We use the best available data to reveal the current operators of infrastructure owned by Carbon Majors and other prolific companies, and represent them with their logos.

Follow the Oil

Let's follow the oil from point of extraction to point of emission – from well to processing plant – through a single pipeline.

This line represents P20030796 – the permit for an 8" natural gas liquids (NGL) pipeline owned by Chevron Pipeline Company, a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation.

The Chevron Wagon Wheel

P20030796 originates at a strange landform at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico: a circular network of oil access canals intersected by over 50 smaller canals that look like spokes.

It is known as the "Chevron Wagon Wheel".

In Louisiana's wetlands, oil and gas fields pool around the perimeters of salt domes – subterranean, cylindrical mounds of salt that squeeze upwards through layers of sand, like silly putty.

To drill, oil companies had to navigate dense marshlands. Roads would be submerged under water within minutes; muskrats gnawed at boardwalks.
The solution? Cutting through the marsh with access canals.

Corporate Succession

In the 1930s, Tidewater Oil Company dredged the first canals that would become the Chevron Wagon Wheel.

Over the decades, those original canal and well networks were aquired and expanded by Getty Oil, Gulf Oil, and Texaco.

Each of these companies has ultimately become a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation. As Chevron acquired their assets, they also absorbed their liabilities.

Reading Canals

Canals are difficult to read as infrastructure; the brown hues of sediment-rich wetland water blend with the color of land. To bring canal architecture into sharper relief, we overlayed a terrain map of water bodies.

If you look closely, you see that there is more water than that which is mapped in black.

Louisiana's rate of erosion (1 football field lost every 45 minutes) far outpaces the speed at which the land can be mapped.

Tap to see only the satellite image.

Land Loss

We applied false color and adjusted the visible bands of satellite images to visualise the loss of land.

Pink reveals the land has been lost since 1973
green shows the land still remaining in 2020.

Name Loss

Between 2007 and 2014, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration removed the names of 31 bodies of water from their maps of Louisiana.

A shoreline survey noted that the land that formed the edges of these ponds, bayous, and bays had disintegrated, merging them into open water.

Yet these lost names were first imposed over a period beginning 300 years ago, displacing the original names of the region.

The erosion of the Delta compells us to remember Louisiana's Indigenous names, like Bulbancha, which means 'land of many languages' in Choctaw. And it forces us to reckon with the fundamental instability caused by settler-colonialism.

Corporate-Colonial Occupation

The first corporate-colonial occupier of Louisiana was The Mississippi Company. Today's multinational oil companies inherit the quasi-sovereign status of colonial joint-stock companies. Impunity shields corporations from accountability.

This map shows the grid of private ownership imposed on the Delta's delicate landforms by the Public Land Survey System — the first US system to plat, or divide, indigenous land into private property.

Let's follow the pipeline north.

The Lafitte Oil Field

The Lafitte Oil Field was once one of the most productive sources of oil and gas in Louisiana.

The Texas Company, aka Texaco (now Chevron), was permitted to drill 539 wells between 1934 and 1996 in this field. Here is one well permit, issued in 1939 for $50.

Wealth Extraction

Using well production data from LDNR, we can see the dollar value of oil extracted by Chevron from Louisina's wetlands between 1978 and 1996.

Production statistics for these wells are only publicly available for these decades – after the decades of peak production. But they give us a small insight into the massive quantities of monetary wealth extracted from Louisiana by these multinational corporations.

Stacking the Money

To make these figures less abstract, we converted the values into one dollar coins and stacked them atop the sites of the wells.

Each stack represents the dollar value of oil (adjusted for inflation) extracted from a single well over two decades.

Chevron and its predecessors/subsidiaries extracted oil valued at more than $27 billion from this sample of 250 wells over 20 years.

Chevron owns approximately 13,500 wells throughout the coastal zone, which have been producing over 90 years. To calculate their gross revenue, the public needs access to the company's full production data.

Permitting Land Loss

As early as the 1930s, State biologist Percy Viosca warned that coastal development was “changing the conditions of existence by its very foundations." By the 1950s, vast networks of canals slashed the coast.

Access canals funnel salt water from the Gulf of Mexico into freshwater and brackish wetlands. Salt kills the vegetation that holds sediment together as land, causing marsh breakup and land loss, among other ecological crises.

Canal permits from the 1980s reveal how the State of Louisiana's regulators continued to knowingly permit Louisiana's disintegration.

Permits like this one estimate the number of acres of wetland directly destroyed by the canal...

They identify the species that would be directly impacted...

And, almost without fail, they are approved.

“Rebuilding" Lost Wetlands

In 2007, Louisiana Governor Edwards began work on a "Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast" to rebuild lost wetlands. The plan would cost at least $50 billion (with estimates up to $140 billion). Yet so far, less than $10 billion has been secured, including $8.7 from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement.

Who should pay the balance?

Let's continue our journey along Chevron's pipeline...

...to its terminus.

The Mosaic Fertilizer Plant

Pipeline P20030796 terminates at the Mosaic Company's diammonium phosphate facility.

Natural gas from Chevron's pipeline is one ingredient used in the production of fertilizer.

Fertilizer from the plant is shipped upriver to farms in the Midwest. It returns to Louisiana in the form of run-off, flowing down the Mississippi into the Gulf where it forms North America's largest Dead Zone – a hypoxic (low- or no- oxygen) zone where life cannot survive.

The “Petrochemical Corridor"...

Death is a common by-product of the fossil fuel industry. Mosaic is just one of more than 200 facilities along an 85-mile stretch of river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, known as the "Petrochemical Corridor".

According to the tax assessor, St. James Parish (featured here) has over two dozen industrial properties, and counting.

... Or “Death Alley"

Here, millions of tons of carcinogenic chemical gases, heavy metals, and carbon dioxide are emitted by oil-processing facilities each year, producing some of the most toxic air in the US and fueling climate change.

In the 1980s, local environmental justice activists nicknamed the region 'Cancer Alley,' but in recent years, activists have re-branded it as 'Death Alley.'

Existing Residential / Future Industrial

In 2014, St. James Parish Council passed a Comprehensive Plan that re-designated the parish's majority-Black districts as 'existing residential / future industrial'.

Louisiana Economic Development has listed dozens of properties as 'ready' for industrial development.

Origin Myths

How did we get here? We can follow the oil even deeper, into the foundation myths that set the tone for Louisiana's future.

"The first chapter in the romantic history of oil and gas in Louisiana begins with a picture of fifteen husky negro slaves..."
—Louisiana Conservation Review, 1938

Plantation Country

The St. James Parish Comprehensive Plan begins by reminiscing about a bygone era “of luxurious living, of sumptuous entertainment, of delightful ease" when "acreage was counted by thousands and slaves by hundreds."

1878

Before it was the "Petrochemical Corridor," this region was "Plantation Country."

Slavery was Louisiana's first extractive industry.

1940

After Emancipation, Black freetown communities grew from rows of slave cabins.

2021

These freetowns are today's fenceline communities (communities that neighbor industrial facilities).

Black descendant activist groups like Rise St. James, the Concerned Citizens of St. John, Inclusive Louisiana, and The Descendants Project have mounted sustained resistance to the industrial buildup that produces 'Death Alley'.

Sacred Land

In 2019, Rise St. James and their legal counsel at the Center for Constitutional Rights announced the discovery of four cemeteries holding the remains of historically enslaved people on former plantations–turned–industrial sites.

This cemetery on Mosaic's property has likely been desecrated by the construction of the facility's waste retention pond.

Three burial grounds on the adjacent property owned by Formosa Plastics have become the frontlines of resistance.

In 2022, activists won a substantial victory: a Louisiana judge cancelled Formosa's permits to double and triple greenhouse gas and toxic air emissions.

In their decision, the judge affirmed the sacred quality of land worked by enslaved people with future generations in mind.

Justice appears on the horizon.

Unjust Enrichment

While the oil and gas industry has extracted untold quantities of wealth, Louisiana is the second-poorest state in the country with one of the highest racial wealth divides, some of the most toxic air in America, and one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the world.

According to the legal doctrine of “unjust enrichment", if an entity (such as a corporation or person) profits from activities that impoverish another, those profits are “unjust" and must be restituted.