Jury orders Chevron to pay $745 million for Louisiana coastal damage in landmark trial

• By ALEX LUBBEN | Staff writer  Apr 4, 2025

A Plaquemines Parish jury ordered Chevron to pay $745 million in damages on Friday to restore an area of Louisiana coastal wetlands, a landmark verdict likely to have wider implications on dozens of other similar lawsuits.

The case was the first to go to trial among 41 parish lawsuits against oil companies seeking to hold them accountable for coastal damage. The verdict may influence how other cases proceed.

It was the culmination of a month-long trial that played out at a courthouse in Pointe à la Hache, pitting the Plaquemines Parish government, represented by lead attorney John Carmouche of Baton Rouge–based law firm Talbot, Carmouche and Marcello, against oil giant Chevron, which was represented by a team of lawyers led by Mike Phillips.

Chevron said in a statement that it plans to appeal “to address the numerous legal errors that led to this unjust result,” Mike Phillips, the company’s lead attorney at trial, said in a statement. “Chevron is not the cause of the land loss occurring in Breton Sound.”

“We continue to fight to restore the coast,” Don Carmouche, a partner with Talbot, Carmouche, and Marcello who has been involved with the litigation since it was first filed in 2013, said moments after the verdict was rendered.

Jurors deliberated for about four hours before arriving at their decision.

Interest accrues on judicial judgement beginning on the date the case was filed. The total amount that Chevron will have to pay, interest included, is around $1.2 billion, according Carmouche’s team. Chevron disputes that figure, and emphasized that it will appeal.

Plaquemines alleged that Texaco skirted state law by failing to apply for coastal permits and not removing oil and gas infrastructure from its site when it stopped using an oil field in Breton Sound. It argued that massive coastal land loss and pollution can be directly linked to Texaco’s oil and gas activity.

Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, said that the regulations in question went into effect in 1980 and were not intended to apply to oil and gas activity that began before that. The company doesn’t deny that land loss has occurred in the area around the site of the oil field, but maintains the oil and gas activity was not responsible for it.

The state also intervened on Plaquemines’ behalf.

“The state is pleased that the trial has ended and that the jury has spoke to this issue,” said Jimmy Faircloth, who represented the attorney general’s office and the Department of Energy and Natural Resources in Pointe à la Hache. “We believe that this outcome represents a fair presentation of the evidence.”

The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a nonprofit that has been working to restore Louisiana's coast for decades, said that the verdict could provide much-needed funding for coastal restoration in Louisiana.

“Our state has a sophisticated, science-based Coastal Master Plan that will help us preserve our communities and culture, but we simply don’t have the money to implement all the projects,” said the organization’s communication director, James Karst. “This type of funding could be a lifeline, helping us do the work that will benefit everyone who depends on healthy wetlands.”

Conservative and energy groups pan verdict

The Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association’s president, Tommy Faucheux, indicated that the verdict would chill economic activity in Louisiana.

“Louisiana cannot prosper in its current litigious climate, when misguided lawsuits can attack the industry that is our main economic driver,” he said in a statement. “Today’s verdict sends a message to the rest of the world that Louisiana is not an attractive place for industry or new investments.”

The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry echoed that statement, noting that “Louisiana’s oil and gas industry supports more than 250,000 jobs and contributes billions of dollars annually to our state’s economy,” the association’s president and CEO Will Green said in a statement. The verdict, he added, “threatens those economic benefits but also sends a chilling message to businesses across the country about the risks of operating in Louisiana.”

The Pelican Institute, a free-market think tank in New Orleans, and Grow Louisiana, an organization that advocates for the energy industry in Louisiana, also issued statements denouncing the verdict.