The next energy crisis

More than a quarter of America’s oil flows through southern Louisiana. Too bad the land is slowly sinking into the sea.

Fortune Magazine — Port Fourchon feels like the edge of the world. As you drive south on Louisiana Highway 1 through Bayou Lafourche, open marshes seem to stretch endlessly until you reach this spot, 60 miles below New Orleans. There, the marsh once known as trembling prairie meets the Gulf of Mexico.

This is an oil-services installation. And though its existence is unknown to most Americans, it is vital to them. Without Port Fourchon and its fleet of vessels bringing food, supplies, equipment, and reinforcements to platforms in the gulf, the U.S. would lose access to nearly a fifth of all the oil and gas it uses.


Port Fourchon is also home to pipelines, miles and miles of them. There are the feeders from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which accommodates the massive tankers that deliver 11 percent of the nation’s foreign oil. There are conduits that supply two of the nation’s strategic petroleum-reserve facilities.

There are countless more for companies such as Shell (Charts), Chevron (Charts, Fortune 500), and BP (Charts). All told, the pipelines at Fourchon connect to half of the refining capacity in this country. And they’re a key stem in a broader branching of pipelines in southern Louisiana, which combine to transport 27 percent of America’s oil and 30 percent of its natural gas.

If the port seems like a mirage on the edge of the marsh, that may be because its permanence is anything but assured. The port sits in a region that, although it escaped the most cataclysmic destruction of Katrina and Rita, is being ravaged by two slow-moving but equally ruinous phenomena: erosion and the sinking of the land.

Fortune