Oystermen find oil settlements more lucrative than harvests

The brave little oyster boats chug out daily from the dock here, but their richest harvest may actually be sitting in the office towers of New Orleans, 60 miles west of this spot where marsh, sky and water converge.

In an arrangement that is a Louisiana seafood specialty, though one that can’t be fried or covered in sauce, an oysterman here in the nation’s top oyster-producing state can make as much, if not more, collecting damage settlements from oil companies as from harvesting the bivalves themselves, according to a recent study by two economists.
On one hand there is a hallowed Louisiana institution, the oyster lease, established early in the 20th century in homage to the fat shellfish off the state’s shores and granted in virtual perpetuity to anybody who was willing to pay $2 per acre a year for coastal bottomland. While legal disputes have led the state to place a moratorium on granting new oyster leases, existing ones are often passed down from father to son, thousands of acres staying in a family through generations, whether they produce oysters or not. In all, some 400,000 acres are now under lease.

On the other hand, there is the black gold beneath the oyster beds — explored for and then piped and shipped from the murky edges of Louisiana for nearly a century now. The leases give the oystermen virtual ownership of these valuable water bottoms. So when an oil company moves a rig across the waters, or puts down a pipe, or simply lays out plans to do so, an oysterman can claim that his harvest is being damaged. Negotiations frequently result in payment.

Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, an industry group representing offshore drillers, said, “A little oyster guy comes up and wants $50,000, we’ll pay it to him, just to get him out of the way.”

Houston Chronicle