After Ike came ashore and failed to kill thousands of people and did not completely obliterate the oil refining capacity of the Houston-Galveston metroplex, the nation seemed to breath a collective sigh of relief as they fired up their riding lawn mowers once again. The still emerging picture from the Gulf of Mexico is not so pretty, as a late release at the NY Times reports. Follow me to the shitstorm you're not hearing about...
Here's the NY Time's article posted late Thursday afternoon:
Hurricane Ike destroys 49 oil platforms in Gulf
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The 49 platforms part is actually somewhat innocuous. None of the platforms were big time producers for the Gulf. The big picture is not so pretty. As of Thursday, close to a week after the storm:
93% of of Gulf oil and 78% of natural gas production still shut in;
2.3 million American electricity customers are still off line.
3 million barrels/day refining capacity is off line.
25% of Gulf natural gas processing still off line from Gustav.
The 3 million barrels/day of refining is the scary figure. A late post yesterday at Wall Street Journal noted that the nation's largest refinery, ExxonMobil’s Baytown facility, is out of commission until the end of the month. That one plant processes over half a million barrels a day of oil (or at least it would, if it were up and running).
The kicker is that even BEFORE Ike, the American domestic supply of gasoline was approaching historic low levels. Check out figure 4 at this Energy Information Administration report to see the precipitous drop in gasoline inventories in the week leading up to Ike:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/...
Still, the headlines read that all is well, we dodged a bullet, some gas stations are gouging with $4+ gas, blah blah blah. I predict that more stations will be selling no-dollar gas because they will have no gas, bags will go over more pumps, price signs will be blank, and 99% of America will wonder "WTF?!" and look for scapegoats. The reality: we have a just-in-time system of gasoline production and delivery, there is no gasoline reserve, and the crops gotta come in, and people are burning gas to make electricity, and it's gonna get worse before it gets better.