BATON ROUGE, LA (April 7, 2025) – A jury in the 25th Judicial District has ruled that LOGA member Chevron must pay $744.6 million in damages in the first of 41 coastal litigation cases to go to trial.

In response, LOGA President Mike Moncla issued the following statement:

“Over the past 72 hours, my phone has not stopped ringing.

The one thing I haven’t stopped thinking about is the fact that, within the last year, our state’s Mineral & Energy Board has been desperately begging operators with new incentives to come back and invest in new state leases. Good luck with that…

This decision against industry is yet another black eye for our state.

From the time these lawsuits began a decade ago, oil and gas activity in Louisiana’s state leases and inland waters has declined to nothing.

Drilling is nil, production is a shadow of its former self, and service companies have been starved into bankruptcies.

Decades ago, the defendants of these frivolous lawsuits invested in drilling in our coastal region after the state encouraged, incentivized, and gave permits to do so, all the while the state raked in billions of dollars in severance and royalty collections.

This case is as frivolous as the ones by liberal cities like Baltimore who sue oil and gas for climate change -- while they sit in their air-conditioned offices.

Friday’s decision sent a chilling effect throughout the industry. This is a terrible precedent our state has set forth.”

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