Historic Oil Field
Lake Washington Field lies in the lower Plaquemines Parish marsh south of New Orleans, on a salt dome that has produced Miocene sands since the 1930s. It is a coastal field in every sense that matters to an owner: wells are reached by boat, surface conditions change with storms and subsidence, and a great deal of the land above the reservoir has converted from marsh to open water within living memory. The reservoir itself is a classic Gulf Coast dome — compartmentalized by faults, uneven across tracts, and periodically revisited by operators as imaging improves.
Development at Lake Washington belongs to the second wave of Louisiana oil, after the coastal parishes had been mapped for salt structures and drilling had moved off the prairie and into the marsh. The dome is one of many identified in southeast Louisiana, and the field established on it became one of the more substantial producers of the lower delta. Leasing across marsh and water bottoms created ownership questions that upland fields never face, including which tracts were privately owned and which belonged to the state as navigable water bottoms.
The field’s later history follows a pattern common to coastal Louisiana domes. Major companies drilled the obvious structural positions, production declined, and the properties were sold on to independents. Each improvement in seismic imaging — and three-dimensional seismic in particular — allowed operators to see fault blocks and attic oil the earlier work had missed, and coastal fields of this kind have been returned to active drilling more than once on that basis. Specific operator and program history should be checked against current Louisiana records, because ownership of marsh properties changes hands frequently.
What makes Plaquemines Parish different from any other producing area in this section is the ground itself. Southeast Louisiana has lost an enormous area of coastal marsh to subsidence, canal dredging and storm erosion over the past century, and the parish sits directly in the path of major hurricanes. Those forces raise the cost of maintaining wells, flowlines and facilities, and they have shut in production for months at a time after big storms. Coastal land loss is also the subject of ongoing litigation in Louisiana involving oil and gas operations, which is a real consideration for anyone holding an interest here.
Lake Washington sits on a piercement salt dome in the Gulf Coast Basin, where deep Louann salt has risen through thousands of feet of deltaic sediment and arched, faulted and truncated the Miocene sand section above it. Traps here are structural and fault-bounded, stacked vertically around the flanks of the dome, and highly compartmentalized. That compartmentalization is the single most important geological fact for an owner: pay thickness, pressure and water encroachment can differ sharply between fault blocks, so two nearby tracts in the same field may have very different producing histories.
Enhanced recovery in the sense used elsewhere in this section — a unitized waterflood or a CO2 project — is not the Lake Washington story. Coastal dome fields are generally revitalized with the drill bit: new seismic, sidetracks into bypassed fault blocks, recompletions uphole into sands the original wells cased off. That kind of redevelopment can lift production sharply on some tracts and leave neighboring tracts untouched. It also depends entirely on an operator committing capital in a high-cost marsh environment, which is a harder decision than an equivalent onshore project.
Plaquemines Parish interests carry risks that a spreadsheet built for West Texas will not capture: storm interruptions, high marsh operating costs, water-bottom title questions, and a coastline that has physically changed since the tracts were described. They also carry genuine upside when an operator returns to redevelop a fault block. Pricing that mix honestly means reading the actual well history on your tract rather than applying a multiple to a check. We underwrite it that way, and we buy minerals and royalties in Plaquemines Parish and provide free written offers.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
It does not erase the mineral rights, which are described by survey rather than by what is above them. It does affect economics and title. Marsh that has become open water raises operating cost and can raise questions about state ownership of navigable water bottoms. Storms interrupt production for months at a time. We look at those factors directly rather than treating a coastal interest like an inland one.
Because a salt dome is heavily compartmentalized. Faults divide the Miocene sands into separate blocks with their own pressure, pay thickness and water history. One block may be drained while the block next to it still holds oil an operator has not yet reached. Field-wide statements mean very little here, which is why we price from well-level history on your specific tract.
It has been before. Coastal dome fields are typically revitalized by drilling rather than by injection: better seismic finds bypassed fault blocks and attic oil, and operators sidetrack or recomplete into them. Whether that happens on your tract depends on an operator choosing to spend capital in a high-cost marsh setting. We treat any such upside as a possibility to be evidenced, not assumed.