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Overview
The Situation: Along the Texas and Louisiana coastal plain there are numerous examples of uplands being converted to wetlands or wetlands being converted to open water along linear trends near oil and gas fields.
Questions:
- Has long-term, large-volume oil and gas production in the Gulf Coast Basin resulted in land-surface subsidence and activation of faults around some fields?
- What are the cumulative environmental impacts of oil and gas production on coastal and nearshore marine environments?
- What will be the extent of future impacts?
- What are the mechanisms and timing of subsidence?
- Are they still active?
- What environmental changes have taken place?
- Can the impact of subsidence be predicted to provide a basis for designing marsh and barrier island-restoration projects, planning hurricane levees, and managing oil and gas production?
This purpose of this project is to answer those questions, provide information about the cumulative environmental aspects of oil and gas production on coastal and nearshore marine environments, and act as a basis for estimating the extent of future impacts.
To do this, the project has been organized into six tasks:
- Production Parameters - investigate threshold values for production parameters and select candidate fields;
- Reservoir Parameters - analyze reservoir parameters of selected fields;
- Framework - investigate depositional and structural framework of selected fields and evaluate mechanisms of subsidence and fault activation;
- Ground Characterization - ground characterization of subsidence and faulting;
- Geophysical Methods - evaluate geophysical methods for regional detection of possible subsidence and fault patterns;
- Land Losses - evaluate land losses related to oil and gas production.
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U. S. Department of the Interior | U.S. Geological Survey
