Coastal Erosion Threatens U.S. Energy Supply

"Port Fourchon [Louisiana] is home to pipelines, miles and miles of them. There are the feeders from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which accommodates the massive tankers that deliver 11 percent of the nation's foreign oil. There are conduits that supply two of the nation's strategic petroleum-reserve facilities.

If the port seems like a mirage on the edge of the marsh, that may be because its permanence is anything but assured. The port sits in a region that, although it escaped the most cataclysmic destruction of Katrina and Rita, is being ravaged by two slow-moving but equally ruinous phenomena: erosion and the sinking of the land.

Some 25 square miles of Louisiana have been collapsing into the gulf each year for three-quarters of a century. A total of 1,900 square miles, roughly the area of Delaware, disappeared between the 1930s and 2005, and another 217 square miles were pulverized into liquid by Katrina and Rita. And that land loss, says Ted Falgout, who has run Port Fourchon for 28 years, poses a growing threat not only to the people who live here but also to the U.S. energy supply.

Without Port Fourchon and its fleet of vessels bringing food, supplies, equipment, and reinforcements to platforms in the gulf, the U.S. would lose access to nearly a fifth of all the oil and gas it uses.

The problem afflicts all of southern Louisiana. As land turns to water, it is exposing thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines that were built underground and were not designed to withstand water or waves."