Offshore Energy

History of significant legal advice on offshore matters

Jones Walker has a distinguished history of supporting offshore energy operations — from its inception and in times of growth, crisis, and uncertainty. Since the 1950s, Jones Walker has regularly been called on to assist clients in times of major disasters throughout the decades, including the 1980 collapse of the Diamond Crystal Salt Dome in Louisiana, the 1982 Ocean Ranger sinking in Newfoundland, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the 2018 oil release in the Mississippi Canyon.

Innovators in the burgeoning offshore wind market

Jones Walker attorneys have been actively involved in the US offshore wind market since 2011, and we continue to be leaders in this sector. We have taken a significant role as legal practitioners and are often sought after thought leaders in both East Coast and Gulf of Mexico developments. Drawing on our proficiencies learned from the renewables, energy, and maritime industries, our team is uniquely positioned, experienced, and poised to effectively meet the challenges of this constantly evolving landscape.

Representative experience

• Represented an offshore energy company in its multibillion-dollar bankruptcy, the largest offshore oil and gas bankruptcy in the history of the industry.
• Represented Pacific Drilling in connection with raising $1.5 billion to finance its emergence from Chapter 11; named Energy Deal of the Year by The M&A Advisor.
• Represented multiple offshore operators in cases challenging the DOI’s implementation of the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act, which saved the offshore industry more than $40 billion in royalty payments.
• Represented an offshore operator in a qui tam claim for more than $70 billion alleging that a federal lessee had falsely certified compliance with regulatory engineering standards for the semi-submersible Atlantis platform.
• Served as lead counsel in a precedent-establishing lawsuit challenging the DOI’s application of both the Royalty Simplification and Fairness Act and the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act.
• Served as lead counsel in a successful “test case” challenge to the DOI’s retroactive application of a method for resolving royalty-in-kind delivery imbalances that resulted from the DOI’s termination of its Royalty in Kind program, pursuant to which federal lease owners delivered billions of dollars of royalties in the form of natural gas.
• Acting as project counsel for a developer in connection with planned offshore wind farm(s) in state waters off the coast of Louisiana. The target operation date for the project(s) is 2029, and the projects are poised to generate 2,000 MW of power.
• Represent a US-based private renewable energy company on multiple projects, including several offshore wind projects located in the Southwest US, Canada, and Asia. Jones Walker attorneys are actively advising on, drafting, reviewing, and negotiating on the client’s behalf more than $2 billion in contracts. The offshore wind project, located in the Sea of Japan, has a planned capacity of over 100 MW and is the first commercial-scale wind facility in Japan.