Building America's First Offshore Oil Port

June 2012 The Journal of American History 187 The 1970s marked a turning point in the history of oil in the United States when two national imperatives—the need to increase energy supplies and the desire to protect the environment—collided. Plans to build the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (loop) to carry foreign crude oil supplies offloaded in the Gulf of Mexico and pumped through a seventy-five mile pipeline corridor across the Louisiana wetlands to shore centered on these two competing priorities. loop addressed the urgent need to accommodate expanding volumes of imported crude oil, while at the same time recognizing that wetlands were a valuable resource that needed to be protected rather than exploited. loop was the first major facility in the Gulf of Mexico that included environmental scientists and environmental planning in its overall design, construction, and operation. Scientific knowledge outside of the oil industry thus reoriented the ways American society valued wetlands and shaped the development of America’s first and only offshore oil port. Throughout the twentieth century, the oil and gas industry transformed the Louisiana Gulf Coast—an area dominated by more than 5 million acres of wetlands—into a corridor for national energy production and delivery.1 Billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas have been produced onshore and offshore and transported across Louisiana’s tidal marshlands through an intricate network of pipelines. These pipelines today handle roughly one quarter of the nation’s petroleum supplies. loop—originally built as a terminal for unloading supertankers offshore—connects to this existing pipeline infrastructure and provides a critical link between American energy consumers and global oil supplies. Since the mid-1990s, loop has also been an important pipeline link for bringing in domestic oil production from the deepwater (greater than 1,000-foot depths) Gulf of Mexico. loop represented a departure from an earlier era when the industry and its permitting authorities viewed the wetland environment as a hazard to be overcome. With national environmental reforms and new cultural attitudes in the 1970s, industrial developers in environmentally sensitive areas such as the Louisiana wetlands and the Alaskan tundra for Building America’s First Offshore Oil Port: loop

Environmental protection · Oil reserves · Petroleum · Petroleum industry · Pipeline transport · Port (circuit theory · Shore · Submarine pipeline · Wetland · Engineering · Environmental Engineering · Environmental Science · Geology · Marine and Offshore Engineering Studies · Oceanography

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