Hurricane Ida made landfall Aug. 31, at Paradis, La., and didn’t take long to disrupt the area’s power and water supplies, and imperil the state’s oil refinery operations with tens of million dollars of lost business. The U.S. Department of Energy reported that nine Louisiana refineries – which supply about 13% of the nation’s capacity – were forced to close temporarily because of the storm.
The utility outages have crippled pipeline, refinery and shipping in the Gulf of Mexico, affecting operations of PBF Energy, Phillips 66 and Valero Energy Corp. OilPrice.com reported that while analysts expect oil and gas production to be restored this week, power outages in Louisiana may force refineries to take longer to restart.
PBF Energy’s Chalmette refinery is still non-operational. Phillip’s 66 reported flooding occurred at its Alliance refinery and it remains shut down as of the evening of Sept. 1. Exxon’s Baton Rouge refinery’s power has been restored.
Electric utility Entergy Corp. restored power to 107,000 customers and brought its New Orleans Power Station back online after three days of restoration work. The area and its estimated 950,000 electric customers without power – second only to Hurricane Katrina’s 1.1 million – were beset by category 4 winds, storm surge of up to 15 feet and areawide flooding.
According to Newsweek, analysts don’t expect any major gas shortages resulting from Ida because inventories had already been higher than normal for this time of year.
