In response to growing environmental concern and regulatory pressure, the oil and gas industry has rallied in an effort to reduce the damage it causes to Louisiana’s wetlands.

Barge-mounted oil derricks - a common sight in Louisiana's wetlands - contribute to the more than $3 billion in federal petroleum taxes collected from the Gulf region annually.

According to John Johnston, Deputy Director of the Louisiana Geological Survey (LGS), preliminary findings by LGS indicate that the size of canals and drilling sites has decreased roughly 30 percent since the 1980s. When asked about the oil industry's impact on coastal wetlands, Johnston said, "Don't believe the hype. They aren't all bad."

People within the oil industry go much further, arguing that they take their environmental commitments seriously, and that their companies are winning awards to prove it. In 1997 Burlington Resources, for example, was the first oil company, as well as the first company from Louisiana, to win the Business Conservation Leadership Award. The company won the award for its continued conservation efforts over the last 40 years, including projects such as:

• local sponsorship of the Brady Canal Hydrologic Restoration Breaux Act Project
• donation of over 1,600 acres of surface land holdings on Isles Dernieres to the state of Louisiana to facilitate three Breaux Act island restoration projects
• a vegetative program to develop plants adapted for erosion control

As Bill Berry, Director of Wetlands Management for Burlington Resources, comments, "We know how important coastal restoration is in Louisiana, and our oil and gas profits help us contribute to the restoration process."

A Checkered Past

Historically, the oil and gas industry hasn't had a reputation for being environmentally friendly. When companies first started drilling in Louisiana during the 1930s, few understood the marsh's high sensitivity to human interference. Consequently, wetlands were freely dredged, drilled and channeled. Dredging for channels was the industry's primary destructive force in the wetlands, allowing salt water into fresh and brackish marshes, drastically changing their salinity levels. The earth dredged from canals was often heaped along the sides in spoil banks, preventing the natural flow of water from distributing nutrients and sediments. The result was the destruction of perhaps hundreds of thousands of acres of natural vegetation in coastal Louisiana.

Aluminum marsh buggies, like the one shown above, do less damage to marsh areas than their steel predecessors.

Innovations Lead to Less Damage

Dredging still remains a destructive practice in the industry, but designs are in place for vehicles that can operate in minimum water depths. For example, shallow-draft barges have been developed that can operate in less than four feet of water while the typical barge needs eight. Additionally, new aluminum marsh buggies, nearly half the weight of their steel predecessors, can skim the surface of wetlands, bending grasses without destroying them during seismic surveys. While these vehicles represent encouraging trends for the future, they have not as yet changed the standard industry practice of dredging canals to 8-foot depths.

The photo above shows the aftermath of an aluminum marsh buggy's passing. Rather than crushing the marsh grass completely, the lighter buggy only bends the grass.

Accompanying these adaptations in vehicle design have been technological advancements in the methods used in locating and extracting oil and gas deposits. Multi-directional drilling techniques allow companies to expand the areas that can be searched from a single site. Instead of being limited to exploring straight down, the new technology can drill at sharp angles. This angular and even horizontal drilling limits the number of locations required to search an area and consequently the amount of dredging done in a marsh.

Directional Drilling Easier On Wetlands

Additional reductions in drilling have been achieved by the practice of setting off small explosives and monitoring the earth's vibrations. The subsequent three-dimensional seismic readings give technicians the data they need to more accurately predict the presence of oil deposits, eliminating the need for numerous exploratory drillings. Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service point out, however, that even the seismic surveys can have a detrimental effect in terms of the wildlife they disturb and the heavy equipment that must be transported into the marsh to accomplish the surveys.

The most promising development lies in the potential to manipulate the data already present in the computer databases to create a kind of geological virtual reality. The result will be that companies will be able to locate new oil deposits without any additional exploratory drilling.

Regulatory Influence

Unquestionably, the efforts of governmental agencies have also had a major influence on the industry's exploration efforts. Before a permit that allows work in wetlands is granted, federal and state agencies such as the Corps of Engineers and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) carefully analyze environmental impacts and evaluate alternative approaches. For example, to minimize dredging, the agencies may require temporary board roads that enable machinery to be driven to project sites. In other instances, they may recommend directional drilling from an existing site as an alternative to a new one. Roger Swindler, a civil engineer for the regulatory branch of the Corps of Engineers, sums up the government's role, stating "With the help of regulatory agencies, the industry's impacts on Louisiana wetlands have definitely gone down."

An examination of the number of permits authorized for the oil and gas industry by the Coastal Management Division of the Louisiana DNR supports Swindler's assessment. The number of these permits has plummeted since 1982 when approximately 1,450 acres of wetlands were disturbed by about 300 projects. By 1992, only 72 projects were given permits for a total of 72 acres. That's a 95 percent decrease in acres disturbed since 1982. Although the number of new projects increased substantially in 1995 and 1996, they fell again in 1997, and the number of acres disturbed by permitted projects remains approximately 65 percent below the 1982 figures.