From the shores of Louisiana: a peek inside of the oil industry

by Jon Bowermaster on


Morgan City, Louisiana – Driving old Highway 90 paralleling the Gulf Coast under a vast, super-heated blue sky filled with cumulus it’s almost possible to forget the horror that continues to seethe beneath the nearby sea.

But the manmade scenery that lines the road – warehouse buildings, one after another, parking lots filled with pick-up trucks and SUVs — brings me right back to the connective tissue that links all of Louisiana: Oil.

Let’s be clear: There is really only one industry in Louisiana. Yes, fishing generates a couple billion dollars a year. And tourism, most of it focused around New Orleans and conventions, brings in more than $6 billion a year.

But all of that pales when stacked next to the $70 billion a year the oil business generates in the state and the 320,000 jobs it creates. A rigger with a high school education can, with overtime, make $100,000 a year. When workers come home from the rigs reeking of oil, they chide their buddies at the bar: “Smell that money!”

Morgan City is the headquarters of Louisiana’s oil industry; it was just offshore in 1947 that the nation’s first oil well was drilled. In the boom years that followed dozens of Cajun welders, tinkerers and mini-inventors got rich off patents devised for those very first reusable, movable drill rigs. One lasting result is the booming service and supply industry that dominates the frontage roads lining the highway.

These companies build, repair and deliver everything the industry needs, from 20-ton heat activators to sandwiches for the rigs, which have morphed into floating villages. There are household names like Halliburton and GE alongside international service companies like Baker Hughes, Delmar and Valeros and dozens of smaller outfits like Dolphin Energy Equipment, Oil Mop LLC and Diamond Offshore.

Scattered among the sprawling warehouses are churches and bars, discount cigarette stores, strip joints, mobile home sales, Po-boy restaurants, more churches and more strip clubs.

It used to be the industry was responsible for 40 percent of the state’s revenues; today it’s between 10 and 15 percent . The state’s governors, from Huey Long through Bobby Jindal, don’t even bother to pay lip service to being independent from the industry. They are joined at the hip, their elections funded by contributions from it, the state’s rules and regulations written and approved by it.

This is not just a Louisiana story though, it is an all-American one. The state provides 30 percent of the nation’s oil supply, to which the rest of us remain very, very thirsty – and addicted — consumers. So what goes on in Louisiana impacts us all.

Near Amelia, just west of Morgan City, we pull off the road to have a look at the monstrous J. Ray McDermott property which stretches for miles towards the Gulf. The company – which built the first all-concrete platform in the Gulf in 1950 and was the first to drill to 100 feet below in 1954 – today provides ships, derricks and barges for the oil industry around the world, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Asian Pacific, the Middle East to the Caspian Sea.

It is a blinking LED billboard that attracts me: The company is looking for employees for deepwater jobs — ROV drivers, shipmates, riggers and more —
a reminder that while the gusher continues, so does the oil industry.

From the Shores of Louisiana: Jon takes to the road

by Jon Bowermaster on

From the Shores of Louisiana: Jon Bowermaster from gadling on Vimeo.

Lafayette, Louisiana — It’s a steamy, early-summer day in Southern Louisiana – expecting the “heat index” to top out today around 108 degrees F! – but it’s good to be back on the ground here. I’ve been coming every few months for the past two years, producing a documentary film, and it’s started to feel like a second-home. One with really good food … and music.

Yesterday, evidence of the impact of the oil spill came home when I went in search of an oyster po-boy. At the first couple stops, café owners apologized for not having any … a first in their lifetimes … because the oyster beds have been shut now for more than five weeks. When I finally did find one, something didn’t feel quite right, so I asked: The oysters came from … somewhere else, outside Louisiana, was all the server could offer with a shrug.

While the spill is conversation number one (with World Cup football second), I can feel a kind of creeping frustration/resignation settling in.

In Lafayette, which has more oil-industry jobs per capita than anywhere other than Midland, Texas, there’s a fair amount of rumbling in the bars and on the street corners about the deepwater drilling moratorium, with a majority believing the New Orleans’ federal judge’s decision to start up again is a good one.

There’s lots of concern about where all that oil waste is heading. A few people have brought up concerns about the health of the workers involved in the clean-up; apparently BP is against the workers wearing respirators on the job because 1) it looks bad on camera and 2) they’re afraid people with their faces covered are going to overheat and collapse.

There’s concern too that while BP appears to be saying all the right things right now in regard to its long-term commitment and willingness to pay all “legitimate” claims that six months from now, a year from now … locals will be locked in fights with the mega-company for their money.

From the shores of Louisiana: What fuels energy change?

by Jon Bowermaster on

Born in the Natal province of South Africa, Ivor van Heerden has been an adopted Louisianan for more than thirty years. During his years here he’s been head of the state’s coastal restoration program, on the staff at LSU, co-director of the state’s hurricane center and a head of Team Louisiana, which investigated the hows and whys of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina.

Also along the way he’s been branded everything from an expert to a gadfly, an egomaniac to a Cassandra. While he predicted the damage a Katrina-like storm would have on New Orleans several years before it happened – thus his charge to investigate after the hurricane – when he came out very publicly pointing fingers at the Army Corps of Engineers for “shoddy engineering” his job at LSU was suddenly eliminated (“budget cuts” said university officials; he’s still suing to get his job back).

He’s stayed in Louisiana since he was let go from LSU more than a year ago because he’s invested so much time studying its coastline and because he truly loves the state and its wildernesses. Since the Gulf spill he’s been up and down the coastline and in the air above it, consulting with clean-up efforts.

When I find him in his gravel drive in a small town outside Baton Rouge he’s packing his car for Houma, home of one of the spill’s command centers. Despite a reputation as a nature lover he’s no fuzzy romantic and is calmly outspoken on everything from big hurricanes to big oil. He’d spent the day before on two flights over the Chandleur Islands, where oil had just come ashore.

%Gallery-95432%”This is absolutely the last thing we need, being the most important part of the year in Louisiana ecologically. Our wetlands are already in such sad shape and now we’ve got hurricane season approaching. It’s the growing season for the grasses and wetland plants that suck energy out of the surge, which help protect us from storms. And of course this is the time of year when the birds are breeding and the fish larvae are starting to enter the bays and estuaries.”

How bad was the view from the air? “It was truly impressive. Some of the slicks are huge – one we looked at was 10 miles by 2 miles, about a mile off the coast. If something like that came ashore it would be devastating.

“A worst case scenario would be that a tropical storm spins out next week and we have five, six, ten feet of surge and it drives that oil in and totally fouls a huge part of coastal Louisiana. In some ways we’re lucky it’s happening now rather than during the height of hurricane season, which is when we expected such a catastrophe to happen because a drill rig had been knocked over.”

Given his ongoing fight with LSU over his job – his request for a trial was turned down just a week ago, though he is appealing – I wonder if he might temper his outspokenness regarding assigning blame for the spill.

“Obviously BP, or Transocean are at fault since it’s their equipment that failed. Whether it was malfunction of equipment or human error, they are ultimately responsible. But we Americans share a fair amount of the blame. Most of us are in denial about the whole energy situation in this country so it is our fault as much as anyone else’s.

“But BP or Exxon or whoever else is not going to go drill in one-mile deep water if they can’t make money. It costs them billions of dollars to sink just one well. But they can make money because of our energy policy. If we could suddenly change it so that we all had solar panels on our roofs, use solar heating and so on, we would reduce the demand for this oil and it would become uneconomical to go into these deep waters and we could eliminate some of these problems. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, I honestly don’t. I think we’re just going to continue down this road until we have a major energy catastrophe when we are all of a sudden forced to change.”

From the shores of Louisiana — A conversation with Paul Templet

by Jon Bowermaster on

Baton Rouge, Louisiana – Standing in the heart of the bucolic, green LSU campus, where Paul Templet taught environmental science for more than twenty years, it’s hard to imagine that the worst ecologic disaster perhaps ever is ongoing just a couple hours away. It’s from this landmark that he took a leave of absence in the 1980s to run, for four years, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, during the reign of “the last good governor we had” (Buddy Roemer), he remembers.

He is pointed in his accusations that those years may have been the last time that real rules and regulations were forced on the oil industry. “Today they write most of them,” he says.

Retired from the university but still living in the town in which he was born and consulting on environmental and coastal concerns, Templet has nearly used up any optimism he might have once had regarding his state and environmental controls. He organized the first Earth Day event near where we are talking, forty years ago.

“Certainly I’ve lost hope that the Louisiana state government will ever change. The oil companies run this state, without question. They control most of the agencies, own most of the legislators and run the governor’s office.” His only hope is that the Deepwater spill will affect change inside the federal government agencies that have a hand in overseeing oil production and environmental protection in the Gulf. “When you’ve got such loose oversight by the Mineral Management Service and the Department of Interior, combined with endemic corruption in the state, I guess none of us are surprised by the spill.”

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Corruption and Louisiana are like oil and oil. Templet suggests that the federal government has been looking the other direction for a number of years too. “Thanks largely to the Bush-Cheney administration. Remember those secret meetings Cheney had early in the administration with oil company executives that he’d never release information about? It was during those meetings where things were decided that would help save the oil industry money. Including not requiring things like backup spill preventers.”

His biggest concerns about the spill are that while it may now seem like the worst ever, it may not be the last and that it won’t affect real change.

“The oil industry is massive in this state. I fought them for years when I was head of the DEQ and we won some battles on what they could dump and where, even radioactive waste they were just dumping into pits in the ground and covering up. But they hate rules and regulations and have ways of getting back at you.” When he returned to his professorship – which, knowing that in his job as chief environmentalists he’d make some powerful enemies, he made university officials guarantee would be waiting for him – his punishment was a pay cut.

While he loves his home state and has no plans of leaving (though he does keep an apartment in Taos) he’s saddened when he looks around at the state of his home state. “We have the biggest gas and oil industry in the lower 48 yet Louisiana ranks among the lowest in most categories. Our roads are awful, so are our schools. Our poverty level is 2nd only to Mississippi.

“The reality is we don’t get much tax money out of the oil industry anymore and most of the drilling is more than three miles offshore, thus in federal waters, so any royalties go to the fed. And the subsidies the state gives the oil industry guarantees we get very little in return for all that they take.”

He remembers from his teaching days that he and his colleagues agreed that it took at least 20 years to see true change. “Maybe in the next twenty years we’ll see a tightening up of regulations on the oil industry. But the thing we have to do is move away from oil and gas because even if we continue to find it, and burn it, we’re just making climate change worse.”

Though it’s hard to believe as oil continues to rush out of the wellhead a mile below sea level at a still-unknown rate, rising sea levels may be an even bigger concern for southern Louisiana than future oil spills. Once the coast line is erased, which many think will happen in the next thirty to forty years, pollution will mean something completely different.

“I saw a map yesterday that showed by 2050 that New Orleans would be gone (meaning about thirty miles of marsh and wetlands would be flooded),” says Templet. This in a state that loses a football field of wetlands every day due to erosion, or about 25 square miles a year.

“I’ve also heard that you can’t get a loan to build a house south of Houma because the banks don’t believe that in the thirty years it will take you to pay off your loan that the house will still be above water.”

From the shores of Louisiana: Exploring the culture of the oil spill

by Jon Bowermaster on

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — I’ve been coming to the Gulf coast of Louisiana every few months since July 2008, making a film about the relationship between man and the water in a place where everywhere you look there is glimpse of a river, creek, bayou, basin, swamp, the Gulf or the Mississippi River. Coincidentally, in light of recent events, one of the first things we filmed upon arrival 23 months ago was an oil spill. At the time when an oil tanker t-boned a barge in the middle of the Mississippi River at midnight on July 28 it seemed catastrophic. Now I know that it was in part business as usual.

That 400,000-gallon spill, in the heart of New Orleans’ drinking water source, quickly coated both banks of the river for 80 miles, all the way to the Gulf. We filmed crews in white hazmat suits power-washing oil off the rocks in New Orleans from the tourist promenade lining the river. In an interview with the Department of Environmental Quality official in charge of the state’s waterways he admitted without hesitation that “this kind of thing happens often in Louisiana, given the massive oil and gas industry that controls things here.”

In the months since we have traveled with, interviewed and filmed a half-dozen of Louisiana’s crème-de-la-crème of environmental activists and environmental ills. My original intent was to try and understand and explain the Dead Zone that grows off the mouth of the Mississippi every summer thanks to fertilizers washed down it from 31 northern states. But one interesting character led to another, one mess to another, and we just kept coming back.

My introduction to Louisiana was fifteen years ago when I came down from my home in the Hudson Valley of New York to write for Audubon magazine about a Dow Chemical plant’s pollution of local aquifers in Plaquemine; I visited a different Plaquemine (this is a Parish) last weekend,, which is ground zero for the current spill, its marshes and wetlands in line to be the first to receive oil from the Deepwater spill, most likely this weekend.

In mid-April we were putting the finishing touches on our film – “SoLa, Louisiana Water Stories” – when I heard the first reports of an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few days I watched in horror, since I was now armed with an insider’s knowledge of just how disastrous the spill could be for the ocean, Louisiana’s coastline and its peoples.

A week ago I returned to southern Louisiana, with video cameras, to re-interview many of the people in our film, to capture their reactions to the still spilling leak. It’s been an emotional past 24 days for each of them; they are truly on the frontlines of trying to assess, clean up and press those accountable. By the time I hooked up with them in the past few days they were already exhausted from a couple weeks of 20 hour days, ranging in efforts to coordinate flyovers for journalists and scientists, finding contributions of protective gear for fishermen enlisted by BP to help clean up, writing press releases, working closely with lawyers suing to make sure fishermen’s lives and rights were being protected and participating in press conferences from the two command centers set up mid-state (in Houma and Roberts).

Ours was never intended to be a film about hurricanes or storms, though their impact will soon be felt in a brand new way as the coming season threatens to carry all that still-floating oil even deeper into Louisiana’s heart. Its intent is not to romanticize fishermen or Cajuns (or their music!). It’s not to turn hard-working environmentalists into heroes and heroines or lying politicians (of which there seem to be an over-abundance in this southland) into even bigger scum than they are.

..the goal all along has simply been to show the complex and connected way of life that links this entire southern coast. Anywhere you turn in Louisiana, there’s water. And everyone in Louisiana has a water story

Rather the goal all along has simply been to show the complex and connected way of life that links this entire southern coast. Anywhere you turn in Louisiana, there’s water. And everyone in Louisiana has a water story … or two, or three. We have filmed in some of the most beautiful corners of the state, from the Atchafalaya swamp — filled with more wildlife than any place in the U.S. to the Gulf off Grand Isle. We’ve also documented some of the region’s most horrific environmental problems including but not limited to oil spills, the Dead Zone, petrochemical plant pollution of air and sky, the cutting down of its natural barrier (the cypress forests), the incredible detritus left behind by the oil and gas companies when they move on and the corruption in government that has for decades led to Louisiana far too often being compared to “America’s toilet bowl.”

In the past dozen years I’ve made as many documentaries; this is the first in the U.S. since 1999. Now that I know Louisiana better, I understand why I was so attracted to the place. Every time I get off the plane in Lafayette I feel like I’ve arrived in some exotic international port. The language is different here; so are the food, the music, and the dance. (I love that everyone here calls me ‘baby,’ from waitresses to grocery store checkout girls, which I initially thought was a true endearment but now realize it’s a comfortable colloquialism.) I’d never been to a Zydeco breakfast before, for example, nor had a lesson in crawfish eating (“pinch their tails, suck their heads”). Now I’m hooked; I can understand why the great documentarian Les Blank made a half-dozen films here forty years ago. It is a rich place for life, for stories, for nature. It’s tragic that it has also become synonymous with disasters, primarily man-made.

Over the next couple weeks I hope my Dispatches from Southern Louisiana will introduce you to some of the powerful conservationist’s voices in the country, all of whom proudly call Cajun country home.

Meanwhile, check out my documentary on SoLA over at jonbowermaster.com