A Louisiana ju-decision judge determined that Chevron must pay the parish government about $745 million.
The verdict reached Friday is likely to affect similar lawsuits filed by other parishes or counties in the state against other energy giants and potential settlement negotiations.
The lawsuit filed by Plaquemines Parish is one of at least 40 that the Coastal Parish has filed against a fossil fuel company since 2013.
The lawsuit alleges that Texaco, which Chevron purchased in 2000, had violated state law for decades by failing to apply for a coastal permit and not removing oil and gas equipment when it ceased use of the Breton Sound oil field southeast of New Orleans.
State regulations in 1980 required businesses operating in wetlands to recover “to be close to their original state.”
Plaquemines Parish, who had sought $2.6 billion in damages, claimed that wetland losses and pollution were directly related to oil and gas jobs.
However, Chevron said its activities are not liable for decades of damage. He also said that the regulations that came into effect in 1980 did not apply to oil and gas activities that had previously begun.
After a four-week trial, the ju judge awarded $575 million to compensate for land losses, $161 million to compensate for contamination, and $8.6 million to abandoned equipment. Chevron said it would appeal to the verdict.
“This verdict is just one step in establishing that the 1980 law does not apply to conduct that occurred decades before the law was enacted,” Chevron's Chief Trial Attorney Mike Phillips said in a statement Saturday. “Chevrons are not the cause of the land losses that occur in Breton Sound.”
Louisiana's state government has become generally friendly to the oil and gas industry, but was on the side of Plakemin in the lawsuit as the state struggles to reverse the loss of vast coastal land.
The state lost more than 2,000 square miles on Delaware's land area due to sea level rise and the loss of sediment that had left along the coast until the free-flowing Mississippi River was held captive by levees built for flood control.
The losses at Plaquemins Parish, a 10-mile lower river in New Orleans, are particularly severe.
The parish was reduced to almost half its original size in the last century. Oil and gas canals cross wetlands, exacerbating the seawater destruction of wetland vegetation. The state is taking proactive measures.
Louisiana has enacted a 50-year, $50 billion coastal master plan to try to save what it can be done from the Gulf of Mexico. The plan includes 124 projects designed to drift sand, rebuild degraded marshlands and add barriers to levees, floods and rainfall rapids. It aims to create tens of thousands of acres of new land, preserve the land, and protect the coast from hurricanes and sea level rise.
The state received billions from the resolution of a lawsuit arising from the Gulf of Mexico's 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
