Coastal eroision is mostly about geology, energy exec say

Coastal land loss is more about fault lines rather than oilfield activity, David Welch of Stone Energy Corporation said during a speech at the Atchafalaya Chapter of the American Petroleum Institute at the Petroleum Club of Morgan City.
A lawsuit filed last year by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East naming oil, gas and pipeline companies contends coastal drilling and dredging has contributed to the loss of coastal wetlands that protect New Orleans from hurricanes.
Welch said, “We hear this in the paper every day that we are losing a football field every hour. It is all the oil companies fault. We are suing you. You are going to have to pay for this.”
But Welch said a recent study by a geologist found the ebb and flow of coastal land is more about fault lines than canals built by the oil and gas industry.
Welch, chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of Stone Energy Corporation headquartered in Lafayette, spoke here Tuesday.
Stone Energy is a publicly traded oil and natural gas exploration and production company. Besides Lafayette, the company has offices in New Orleans, Houston and Morgantown, West Virginia.
“The coastal wetlands of south Louisiana is only 6,000 years old, a blink of the eye in geological terms,” Welch said.
“The way we got here, the way our land got here, is because the Mississippi River has flipped back and forth many, many times,” he said.
Sediment from the Rockies to the Appalachian mountains drained into the Mississippi River basin and was spread across the Louisiana coast, he said.
As an example, Welch said 5,500 years ago New Orleans was an offshore island. Since then, more than 3,000 square miles of land was formed, he said.
Lawyers are comparing the amount of land in 1932 to today, he said. That also is a period when massive public works programs began building dams and locks, which reduced the amount of sediment flowing to the Louisiana coast, he said.
Modern farming introduced techniques to reduce runoff, he said.
The theory is that the building of dams and locks and modern farming techniques did not really cause all of the land loss, he said. “The theory is what we do in our business caused all of the land loss.”
Oil and gas industry canals are blamed for allowing saltwater intrusion, he said.
Showing maps of fault lines, Welch made his case the land loss correlates to those lines rather than other causes.
The faults lines are where oil and gas form and that’s why oilfield activity exists near them, but they also are sites of subsidence, he said.
“The wetlands were created by this deltaic deposition,” he said. “They are also lost by natural subsidence. They are also lost to decreased sediments. We are also losing land to these geological faults.”
Coastal restoration is not very likely, he said.
“Unless we knock down all the levees, where you can flood every year, unless we somehow restore sedimentation, which means tear up all the locks and dams that are up river and unless farmers go back to farm where they conserve their soil, then it is very unlikely there can be a solution for coastal restoration,” he said.