Hydraulic fracturing of shale beds has led to a boom of oil and gas production in the United States, reversing a slow decline that had been underway for decades. To accommodate that growth, additional storage and processing plants have been built. Under President Obama, a long ban on export of US oil was lifted, leading to the construction of new export facilities. Unfortunately, many of these new structures—from storage tanks to port facilities—have been built on the Texas coast at a location that is now directly in the path of a strengthening hurricane and massive flood.
As Eric Holthaus at Grist reports …
Corpus Christi, a critical port for the Texas oil and gas industry, is also one of the most vulnerable places in America when it comes to coastal flooding. An analysis earlier this year by the South Texas Economic Development Center predicted that 92 square miles of the Corpus Christi metro area would flood with a six-foot rise in water, including all six of the city’s refineries.
Harvey could bring up to twice that, with as much as 12 feet of storm surge potentially swamping refinery infrastructure, including huge tanks of crude oil, with saltwater.
The location of the storm and these facilities offers almost unlimited opportunities for spills from small to monstrous as pipelines and storage tanks could be ruptured or even torn from their foundations. Meaning that what’s starting as a disaster for Texas, could end up being an ecological disaster for the entire Gulf region.
The concentration of oil and gas facilities in the region also means that Harvey could have a major effect on what happens at your local gas pump, and possibly what happens for the US economy as a whole.
About one-third of U.S. refining capacity lies in the path of Harvey, and operators are starting to shutter operations in advance of the storm. Any sustained outages could cause a temporary nationwide surge in gasoline prices. Patrick DeHaan, an oil industry analyst, told Grist that catastrophic flooding could prevent refiners from getting back online quickly.
Disabling the Corpus Christi facilities for an extended period could have implications that reach to the Middle East and Russia.
As the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cuts production to prop up oil prices, American exports are beginning to elbow out Saudi crude in some markets, a development that would have been inconceivable four decades ago when OPEC oil embargoes threatened to cripple the American economy.
Halting the flow of American oil could ease production and price pressures for OPEC. It could also boost the flow of cash into Russia at a time when Vladimir Putin has been having to make tough decisions between funding his military reach into Syria and Ukraine while the economy erodes back home.
On the ecological front, the risks from Harvey could go well beyond oil spills. From Emily Atkin at New Republic …
Environmental advocates are also worried that Harvey will create long-term public health problems due to accidental toxic substance releases, and not just from refineries and power plants. In the 30 counties where a disaster has been declared, there are dozens of Superfund sites, many of which are essentially waste pits containing harmful chemicals. The San Jacinto River Waste Pits, for example, contain carcinogenic dioxins, which are linked to birth defects. Advocates also rightly point out that communities living closest to all these sites—both the Superfunds and the refineries—are disproportionately low-income and minority. “This is an environmental justice issue,” Enck said.
This single storm could create a disaster area in the United States that remains uninhabitable for weeks or months, resulting in hundreds of thousands of displaced residents. It could cut production of oil and gas enough to affect world affairs and prices at the pump—as well as having an effect on specialty fuels, like aviation fuel, that could rock the economy. And it could cause a multi-faceted environmental disaster on a scale that’s awful to contemplate.
But … and it’s a big but, all of that is a worst-case scenario. The storage tanks won’t necessarily fail. The refineries might not be down for that long. The port facilities may ride out the waves and wind.
Everything now is down to what happens in the next few hours as the storm surge launches into the Texas coast.