(The Center Square) — A federal appeals court has put Plaquemines Parish’s $744.6 million coastal-damage verdict against Chevron back in jeopardy, sending the case to a federal judge and temporarily blocking further proceedings in state court.

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday vacated a federal district court’s earlier decision sending the Plaquemines Parish lawsuit back to state court.

The three-judge panel instead returned the jurisdictional dispute to the federal district court to reconsider in light of an April U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave oil companies a significant victory in their effort to move some of Louisiana’s coastal lawsuits into federal court.

“We express no view on the merits of this case and leave all issues to be addressed by the district court in the first instance,” the Fifth Circuit said.

The panel also blocked state court proceedings for 60 days unless the injunction is extended or lifted earlier.

The order is significant because the case is the same lawsuit in which a Plaquemines Parish jury returned a $744.6 million verdict against Chevron in April 2025 for damage attributed to decades of oil and gas operations.

The verdict included roughly $575 million for land loss, $161 million for contamination and another $8.6 million related to abandoned equipment. But the state judge never entered a final judgment on the verdict before the case was stayed, meaning Chevron has not been ordered to pay the award.

Chevron said in an Aug. 6 securities filing that the verdict remains subject to further court proceedings, including the possibility that it could be vacated and the dispute litigated in federal court. The company said it does not concede that the jury verdict is valid and plans to appeal any judgment ultimately entered against it.

At the center of the increasingly complicated jurisdictional fight is a decades-old connection between Louisiana oil production and World War II.

Plaquemines Parish and other coastal parishes filed 42 lawsuits beginning in 2013 accusing oil and gas companies of violating Louisiana’s State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act. The lawsuits generally allege companies operated without required permits, failed to comply with permits or failed to restore coastal wetlands damaged by their operations.

The oil companies have spent years trying to move many of those cases from Louisiana state courts into federal court.

Their argument relies partly on a federal law allowing certain lawsuits against companies acting on behalf of the federal government to be moved into federal court.

During World War II, a predecessor of Chevron produced crude oil in Plaquemines Parish while also operating under a federal contract to refine aviation gasoline for the U.S. military. The question became whether the company’s Louisiana oil production was sufficiently connected to its work for the federal government to help qualify the coastal lawsuits for federal court.

Lower courts said the connection was not strong enough, in part because Chevron’s federal refining contract did not specifically instruct the company to produce crude oil in Louisiana.

The Supreme Court rejected that reasoning in April.

In a unanimous ruling among the eight participating justices, the court found Chevron had plausibly shown a sufficiently close relationship between its wartime Louisiana oil production and its federal obligation to refine aviation gasoline. The federal government did not have to specifically order Chevron to conduct the particular oil-production activities challenged by Louisiana for the two to be related, the court found. Justice Samuel Alito did not participate.

But the Supreme Court did not decide that the lawsuits automatically belong in federal court or rule on whether Chevron is liable for the alleged coastal damage.

Instead, the justices resolved one key requirement of the federal-officer removal law and sent the jurisdictional fight back to the lower courts to address the remaining issues.

That distinction is particularly important for the $744.6 million verdict.

The Fifth Circuit heard arguments Aug. 5 over what should happen next in the case, formally known in state court as Plaquemines Parish v. Rozel Operating Co. Rather than decide the remaining jurisdictional questions itself, the majority on Monday sent the dispute back to the federal district court.

Judge Andrew Oldham dissented from that portion of the decision, saying he would have decided the appeal rather than sending it back to the lower court.

The consequences could stretch far beyond the one verdict. Chevron told investors this month that its entities are defendants in 35 Louisiana coastal lawsuits, making the fight over state versus federal jurisdiction potentially consequential for much of the remaining litigation.

For now, the Fifth Circuit has not erased Plaquemines Parish’s $744.6 million jury verdict. But whether that verdict survives — and whether the case ultimately proceeds in state or federal court — is once again in the hands of a federal district judge.