A jury in Louisiana ruled that Chevron must pay a government of the parish about $ 745 million to help restore the wetlands that the jury said that the energy company had harmed for decades.
It is likely that the verdict, which was reached on Friday, influences similar demands presented by other parishes, or counties, in the state against other energy giants and their possible liquidation negotiations.
The demand, presented by the platelet parish, is one of the 40 that coastal parishes have presented against fossil fuel companies since 2013.
The lawsuit argued that Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2000, violated state law for decades by not requesting coastal permits, and not eliminating oil and gas equipment when he stopped using an oil field in Breton Sound, which is southeast of New Orleans.
A state regulation in 1980 required that companies operate in wetlands to restore “so close to their original condition” any channel they will drug, wells that drilled or wastewater that threw the swamps.
The platelet parish, which had requested $ 2.6 billion in damages, argued that the loss of wetlands and pollution were directly related to oil and gas work.
However, Chevron said his activities were not responsible for the decades of damage. In addition, he said that the regulations that entered into force in 1980 were not applied to the oil and gas activity that began before.
The jury, after a four -week trial, gave Parish $ 575 million to compensate for land loss, $ 161 million to compensate for pollution and $ 8.6 million for abandoned teams. Chevron said the verdict would appeal.
“This verdict is just one step in the process to establish that the 1980 law does not apply to the conduct that occurred decades before the law was enacted,” said Mike Phillips, Chevron’s main litigating lawyer, in a statement on Saturday. “Chevron is not the cause of the loss of land that occurs in Breton Sound.”
The Louisian State Government, although it is generally friendly with the oil and gas industry, took the side of platelets in demand, while the State struggles to reverse the great loss of coastal lands.
The State has lost more than 2,000 square miles, around the land area of ​​Delaware, due to the increase in sea level and the loss of sediment that a Mississippi river of free flow used to leave along the coast, until the river was limited by the dikes built for flood control.
The loss in the platelet parish, which is 10 miles below New Orleans, is particularly acute.
The parish has been reduced by almost half of its original size in the last century. Oil and gas channels cross their wetlands, exacerbating the destruction of seawater from the swamp vegetation. The State has taken aggressive countermeasures.
Louisiana has promulgated a 50 -year -old coastal master plan and $ 50 billion to try to save what can increase the Gulf of Mexico. The plan includes 124 projects designed to dredge sand, rebuild degraded swamps and add dikes, gates and stormy barriers. Its objective is to create tens of thousands of acres of new lands, preserve which land remains and protect the hurricane coast and increased sea level.
The State received billions of dollars from the liquidation of demands derived from the Deepwater Horizon 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which was the worst spill of oil on the high seas in the history of the United States.
