OCSLA and Texas Chapter 95: Premises Liability on Offshore Platforms

If you were hurt on a fixed platform in the Gulf of Mexico — a spar, a tension-leg platform, or a jacket sitting in federal water off the Texas coast — the law that governs your case is not the law most people would expect. It is a hybrid: a federal statute that reaches out and borrows a state's law to fill its own gaps. Understanding that borrowing is the key to understanding why a Texas premises-liability statute written for landowners can end up deciding a case about a piece of steel two hundred miles offshore.

This page explains how the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code Chapter 95 interact, where Chapter 95 actually applies, and the recurring fight over whether it shields operators or only owners.

OCSLA borrows the adjacent state's law

The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act governs activity on the seabed and the fixed structures attached to it beyond the three-mile state line. For an injury on a fixed platform on the Outer Continental Shelf, OCSLA does two things that matter. It gives the federal district court of the adjacent state original jurisdiction over disputes arising from operations there. And, under 43 U.S.C. § 1333(a)(2), it adopts the civil and criminal laws of the adjacent state as "surrogate federal law" — applied as federal law, but drawn word-for-word from the neighboring state — to the extent those laws are applicable and not inconsistent with federal law.

For a platform off the Texas coast, the adjacent state is Texas. That is how a Texas statute ends up controlling a premises case on the federal shelf.

A threshold point worth keeping in mind: OCSLA's borrowed-state-law regime applies to fixed platforms and similar structures, not to vessels. A worker injured aboard a vessel may instead be a Jones Act seaman or a Longshore harbor worker under § 905(b) — different bodies of law, with different and often more favorable standards. Which regime applies turns on the facts of the work and the structure involved, and it is one of the first questions a maritime lawyer will work through.

What Chapter 95 does

Texas Chapter 95 is one of the most protective premises-liability statutes any state has enacted. It applies to a claim by a contractor (or a contractor's employee or subcontractor) against a property owner for personal injury arising from the condition or use of an improvement to real property, where the claimant is constructing, repairing, renovating, or modifying that improvement.

Where it applies, Chapter 95 bars the claim against the property owner unless the claimant proves both elements of section 95.003:

• that the owner exercised or retained some control over the manner in which the work was performed, other than the right to order the work to start or stop or to inspect progress; and
• that the owner had actual knowledge of the danger or condition resulting in the injury and failed to adequately warn.

Both prongs must be met. A claimant who can prove control but not actual knowledge — or knowledge but not control — does not get past the statute. That is what makes Chapter 95 a favorite of the defense bar, and why it shows up in almost every Gulf platform injury case as the opening move.

The owner-versus-operator question

Here is where the statute's reach is genuinely contested, and where many platform cases are won or lost.

Chapter 95, by its terms, protects a property owner. Offshore, the entity that owns a lease or platform and the entity that operates it are frequently different companies — sometimes related, sometimes not. Defendants routinely move for summary judgment asking the court to treat owner and operator as interchangeable, and to extend the shield to every related entity at once.

The lead authority defendants cite is the Fifth Circuit's statement that "entities operating offshore oil and gas rigs … are owners under Chapter 95." Read in isolation, that sentence looks decisive. Read in context, it is not. The same opinion goes on to explain that the defendant there owned and operated the platform — and the case it relies on, Francis v. Coastal Oil & Gas, limits Chapter 95 to "an owner who is also an operator." Decisions pairing the two, like Petri, sit in the same camp: the protected defendant both owned and operated. None of them extends the statute to an operator that does not also own.

Defendants also lean on the Texas Supreme Court's decision in Ineos USA, LLC v. Elmgren for the idea that related entities ride the statute together. But Ineos treated the defendants collectively only because the parties and the court of appeals had already done so — a convention of how that case was litigated, not a holding that the owner/operator distinction does not matter. The question simply was not presented.

The practical upshot: a careful read of the defense's own authorities often shows that Chapter 95 protects the property owner, and that operators who do not also own the platform are not automatically inside the shield. That distinction was the hinge of our Chapter 95 platform case, where the court declined to extend Chapter 95 to the platform's operators and kept them in the case.

The summary-judgment burden after *Energen*

There is a common misconception — sometimes encouraged by the way Chapter 95 motions are briefed — that the plaintiff must come forward at summary judgment with affirmative proof of both control and actual knowledge. That is not how the burden works on a traditional motion.

In Energen Resources Corp. v. Wallace, 642 S.W.3d 502 (Tex. 2022), the Texas Supreme Court reaffirmed the ordinary rule: the party moving for traditional summary judgment must conclusively establish its defense, and the nonmovant has no burden to respond unless and until the movant has done so. Applied to Chapter 95, the movant must conclusively negate the claimant's ability to satisfy section 95.003 — not simply assert that the claimant lacks evidence. When a defense brief treats the burden as if it were the plaintiff's to carry, Energen is the answer.

Condition versus danger

A related defense argument is that a hazard was "open and obvious," so the worker knew of it and assumed the risk. The Texas Supreme Court's decision in Los Compadres Pescadores, LLC v. Valdez (Tex. 2021) draws a line that matters here: knowing of a condition is not the same as knowing of the danger it creates. A worker can see a piece of equipment or a structural layout without understanding the specific, often non-obvious mechanism by which it will cause harm. The actual-knowledge inquiry under Chapter 95 — and the worker's own awareness — turns on knowledge of the danger, not merely the visible condition.

Why this matters for an injured worker

OCSLA platform cases sit at an unusual intersection: federal-court jurisdiction, borrowed Texas substantive law, and a federal safety overlay from the offshore regulators. The cases that reach full value tend to be the ones where the worker's lawyer understands that framework before the first summary-judgment brief arrives — and knows that the defense's lead Chapter 95 quotation often does not say what it appears to say.

If you were injured on a fixed platform on the Outer Continental Shelf, it is worth having the owner/operator question and the section 95.003 elements evaluated carefully rather than accepting that a premises statute ends the case. You can read how these issues played out in a real matter in our Chapter 95 platform case, or see the firm's other complex maritime cases.

In practice

In practice, Chapter 95 is the platform operator's shield — a statute written to protect landowners from their contractors' work, stretched to cover offshore operators. Its exceptions are real and provable: the operator's control over the work and its actual knowledge of the danger. The firm has defeated the gambit on an Outer Continental Shelf structure by proving exactly those points.

Related case studies

• Defeating the Chapter 95 Operator Defense — the operator’s Chapter 95 shield defeated on an OCS structure.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. See all case studies.