Louisiana cancels $3 billion coastal restoration project funded by oil
spill settlement
[July 18, 2025] By
JACK BROOK
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana on Thursday canceled a $3 billion repair of
disappearing Gulf coastline, funded by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil
spill settlement, scrapping what conservationists called an urgent
response to climate change but Gov. Jeff Landry viewed as a threat to
the state’s way of life.
Despite years of studies and reviews, the project at the center of
Louisiana's coastal protection plans grew increasingly imperiled after
Landry, a Republican, took office last year. Its collapse means that the
state could lose out on more than $1.5 billion in unspent funds and may
even have to repay the $618 million it already used to begin building.
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a mix of federal agencies
overseeing the settlement funds, said that "unused project funds will be
available for future Deepwater Horizon restoration activities” but would
require review and approval.
A plan to rebuild disappearing land
The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project aimed to rebuild upward of
20 square miles (32 kilometers) of land over a 50-year period in
southeast Louisiana to combat sea level rise and erosion on the Gulf
Coast. When construction stalled last year because of lawsuits, trustees
warned that the state would have to return the hundreds of millions of
dollars it had already spent if the project did not move forward.
Former Louisiana Rep. Garret Graves, a Republican who once led the
state's coastal restoration agency, said that killing the project was “a
boneheaded decision" not rooted in science.
“It is going to result in one of the largest setbacks for our coast and
the protection of our communities in decades,” Graves said. “I don't
know what chiropractor or palm reader they got advice from on this, but
— baffling that someone thought this was a good idea.”
Project supporters stressed that it would have provided a data-driven,
large-scale solution to mitigate the worst effects of an eroding
coastline in a state where a football field of land is lost every 100
minutes and more than 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) of
land have vanished over the past century, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey.
The project, which broke ground in 2023, would have diverted
sediment-laden water from the Mississippi River to restore wetlands
disappearing because of a range of factors including
climate-change-induced sea level rise and a vast river levee system that
choked off natural land regeneration from sediment deposits.
“The science has not changed, nor has the need for urgent action,” said
Kim Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal
Louisiana. “What has changed is the political landscape.”
The Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group last year had noted that "no
other single restoration project has been planned and studied as
extensively over the past decades.”
A perceived threat to Louisiana culture
While the project had largely received bipartisan support and was
championed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, his successor has been a
vocal opponent. Landry recoiled at the rising price tag and amplified
concerns that the massive influx of freshwater would devastate local
fisheries.
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The nearly $3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project along
the Mississippi River, intended to stave off coastal land loss in
southeastern Louisiana, is seen during a flyover with the
environmental coalition group Restore the Mississippi River Delta,
Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Jack Brook, File)
 Landry has said the project would
“break” Louisiana’s culture of shrimp and oyster harvesting and
compared it to government efforts a century ago to punish
schoolchildren for speaking Cajun French.
“We fought this battle a long time, but Gov. Landry is the reason we
won this battle," said Mitch Jurisich, who chairs the Louisiana
Oyster Task Force and sued the state over the project's
environmental impacts, including likely killing thousands of
bottlenose dolphins due to the onslaught of freshwater.
Landry said in a statement that the project is “no longer
financially or practically viable," noting that the cost has doubled
since 2016.
“This level of spending is unsustainable,” Landry said. The project
also “threatens Louisiana's seafood industry, our coastal culture,
and the livelihoods of our fishermen — people who have sustained our
state for generations.”
The project's budget had included more than $400 million for
mitigating the costs to local communities, including to help the
oyster industry build new oyster beds. Project proponents said that
the rapid loss of coast meant communities would be displaced anyway
if the state failed to take action to protect them.
“You either move oysters or move people, and there's only one answer
to that question," Graves said.
State seeks a smaller, cheaper solution
Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the lead
agency overseeing the project, said in a statement that the project
was “no longer viable at this time based on a totality of the
circumstances" including costs, litigation and a federal permit
suspended earlier this year after the state halted work on the
project.
Chairman Gordon “Gordy” Dove said that “our commitment to coastal
restoration has not wavered" and that the state plans to pursue a
smaller-scale diversion nearby. Dove told lawmakers earlier this
year that the state could save at least $1 billion with a different
plan to channel river water into the Gulf Coast at a rate 5 to 30
times less than the Mid-Barataria project's 75,000 cubic feet per
second.
Conservation groups bristled at the change in plans. The Mid-Barataria
project's termination marked “a complete abandonment of
science-driven decision-making and public transparency,” Restore the
Mississippi River Delta, a coalition of environmental groups, said
in a statement, adding that the state was “throwing away” money
intended to protect its coastal residents and economy.
The coalition said alternative measures proposed by the state, such
as the smaller-scale diversion or rebuilding land by dredging, were
insufficient to meaningfully combat land loss and did not undergo
the same level of scientific vetting as the Mid-Barataria project.
“A stopgap project with no data is not a solution," the coalition
said. “We need diversion designs backed by science — not politics.”
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