Tracing the Flow of Oil and Gas: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Environmental Justice in Coastal Louisiana from 1980 to 2010

Abstract

Minority communities in Louisiana have long been at the forefront of the struggle to achieve environmental justice. To date, much of this struggle has focused on communities located in the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor, where rural African American communities have historically been disproportionately impacted by the growth of the petrochemical industry. This research examines the broader oil and gas production chain and shows that minority groups residing in Louisiana's coastal zone have been increasingly disproportionately impacted by the development of the offshore oil and gas industry. Extracting and processing oil and gas is an energy-intensive undertaking that requires an expansive network of land-based infrastructure. This infrastructure includes gas processing plants, refineries, petrochemical plants, and a pipeline network that link extraction activities to production activities. In addition, there is extensive infrastructure associated with oil and gas development that is not usually considered within the oil and gas production hierarchy, such as platform fabrication, ship building, and pipe coating. Due to the often-conflicting geographies of risk and settlement, these hazards are not equitably distributed across social groups. Using a combined risk and proximity-based hazardousness of place model to assess the cumulative impacts of these industries, this research found that oil and gas development from 1980 through 2010 has increasingly impacted the Native American and Asian populations in coastal Louisiana, groups that have historically been dependent on the region's abundant fisheries. This research also found that racial and ethnic minority groups are more likely to be disproportionately impacted than other socially vulnerable population groups.

Steam cracker facilities in the United States: operations, emissions, and sociodemographic patterns of surrounding populations

“…Several SCFs we identified are located in the Louisiana industrial corridor, commonly referred to as 'Cancer Alley' [69,70], where a recent EPA investigation found longstanding racial discrimination in the allowable emissions of toxic air pollutants and consequent adverse impacts to the health of Black residents [71]. The distributive justice issues observed for SCFs are consistent with those observed for other phases of the oil and gas production lifecycle across multiple geographic contexts [68,72]. A recent study reported an association between redlining (racist lending and housing policies) and locations of fossil fuel-based electricity generation plants [73].…”

Place, Race, and Case: Examining Racialized Economic Segregation and COVID-19 in Louisiana

“…Today, Black and low-income residents in Louisiana disproportionately live near chemical plants and oil refineries [53]. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, residents of northern and southwestern regions face higher exposure to air pollutants (e.g., particle matter (PM)) and risk for respiratory and immunological hazards [105], even though oil refineries are concentrated in southeastern Louisiana [44]. In southeastern Louisiana, an 85-mile stretch of predominately Black parishes between Baton Rouge and New Orleans houses over 150 factories.…”

Natural Gas Gathering and Transmission Pipelines and Social Vulnerability in the United States

“…Overall, research from rural Appalachia confirms that easements, safety concerns, and other factors facilitate drastic alteration of communities, transforming rural landscapes into sprawling, industrial settings within a few years (Caretta & McHenry, 2020; Donnelly, 2018). Implications of these changes for rural public health and other societal concerns are still coming into focus, but one emerging theme is that oil and gas infrastructure often exacerbates existing social vulnerability (Blinn et al., 2020; Hemmerling et al., 2021). Together, these examples call into question the idea that midstream pipelines have negligible societal impacts in rural areas simply because populations are less dense than in urban areas.…”