How the energy business is drowning Louisiana

America’s oil and gas infrastructure needs Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. But it is helping to destroy them

NEW YORK (Fortune) — The swampland of coastal Louisiana, often thought of as a folkloric backwater, is in fact the nation’s most important petrochemical complex: an archipelago of some 4,000 oil and gas platforms.

Glowing like rejected sets from Waterworld along the shore, 17 giant petroleum refineries and more than 180 petrochemical plants gush out jet fuel, lubricants, and scores of other products. (The state also hosts two of the four Strategic Petroleum Reserve storage facilities and about 15,000 smaller land-based oil wells.)

Taken together, Louisiana and the area off its coastline produce or transport 30 percent of the nation’s domestic crude oil and 34 percent of its natural gas; it also refines 16 percent of our petroleum.

And the complex is growing. As energy demand rises, industry has proposed erecting 13 more liquid-natural-gas terminals in the United States. Four will be on the Louisiana coastline (another six will be just across the border in Texas). And Congress, responding to high gas prices, is about to open still more of the continental shelf to oil and gas exploration.

Fortune