Hurricane Ike, Energy Infrastructure, Refineries and Damage Models Thread #4

Hurricane Ike’s current track currently is headed directly for Houston/Galveston and is expected by the National Hurricane Center to be Category 3 at Saturday landfall, which remains in striking distance of over 5 million bpd of US petroleum refining capacity. (A little perspective: 5 MMBBL is about 30% of US capacity (about 15 MMBBL), and a bit less than 6% of global capacity (~85 MMBBL). Also, the MMS reported Wednesday that staff has been evacuated from 452 production platforms (63.0%) and 81 rigs (66.9%)

Here is the latest update from Chuck Watson at KAC/UCF as of Sep 12 06z (02:00 EDT)

Current Situation: At 8am ET we are seeing 110 knot winds at the Shell Garden Banks platform – however, that is at 122m above the surface. Observations are normally standardized to 10m, so 95 knot surface winds are reasonable. Peak wave heights are in the 30-40 ft range across the entire GoM lease areas. These are within the range modern equipment can handle, however, as with Gustav, some of the older platforms with 35ft air gaps may have damage, but the newer deep water stuff should be OK. We will probably permanently lose 2-3% production as these older platforms will not be replaced. Overall, despite losing most of September production, by the end of October we should be back to 75%+ and offshore production should recover to 90-95% by the end of the year.

The Oil Drum