Taylor Energy

Former American independent energy producer

Taylor Energy is an American oil company that is based in New Orleans, Louisiana that drilled for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The company was founded on July 20, 1979 by Patrick F. Taylor. Following his death in 2004, his wife Phyllis Taylor assumed ownership and became the chairwoman and CEO—making her the wealthiest woman in Louisiana. as of 2021, Phyllis Taylor remains the CEO of the company.

The company's founder, Patrick F. Taylor, grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and attended Louisiana State University. He married Phyllis Miller in 1965, who had grown up in Abbeville, Louisiana, and had been one of the first women to graduate from Tulane Law School. Taylor Energy was first incorporated on July 20, 1979. The MC20 wells which were and are still leaking, was not part of the sale. Despite this apparent sale, the company continues to be incorporated in New Orleans, By October 2018, the continuing spill was approaching the level of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. In 2019, Taylor Energy went to court to stop the government's efforts to fix the leak, filing four lawsuits against the Interior Department, U. S. Coast Guard, and Couvillion Group. The Couvillion Group, a marine construction company based in Belle Chase, Louisiana, was hired by the government to recover and contain the spill in 2019; In its first year of operation, the system retrieved around 400,000 gallons of oil; the Coast Guard considers a release of 100,000 gallons of oil in coastal waters a "spill of national significance." The company had collected over a million gallons of oil as of July 2022. The lawsuit against Couvillion Group by Taylor Energy for “trespassing” as they worked to contain the spill was dismissed by U. S. District Court Judge Greg G. Guidry on August 21, 2020.