The negative effects brought on by Hurricane Harvey are beginning to subside as oil and gas operations continue to return to pre-storm conditions.
According to IHS, the port of Corpus Christi is open with no restrictions since Occidental loaded a crude tanker in the port over the weekend. Corpus Christi is a major exporting port for crude from both the Eagle Ford and Permian shale basins.
The United States Coast Guard posted an update saying the Galveston Bay entrance channel, outer bar channel, inner bar channel, bolivar roads anchorages, bolivar roads channel and Galveston harbor and Waterway MM350 to Freeport are open.
BSEE reports that as of September 4, 2017 crude oil producing wells shut-in account for 6.94% of all the wells in the Gulf of Mexico while the gas producing wells that are shut in account for 8.05%. The percentage of oil and gas producing wells that are shut in continues to decrease as operations recover from the storm.
At least two of the 20 affected refineries (Valero’s Corpus Christi and Texas City plants) had returned to normal run rates yesterday, with several others projected to join them in the next 48 hours. Also, the amount of crude distillation capacity offline is approximately 19%, which is lower than 25% one week ago, according to IHS.
Commodity prices
The price of US crude increased to $49.13 USD (WTI Crude Oil) and $54.20 USD (Brent Crude Oil). Major pipelines that move fuel from Houston to Dallas, St. Louis, Tulsa and Chicago were back in operation. According to Bloomberg, as refineries along the Gulf Coast restart, about 2 million barrels per day of capacity will remain offline by Thursday, down from a peak of 4.6 million barrels per day. About 1.4 million barrels per day could remain offline through mid-September, said Bloomberg.
Harvey has had less of an effect on natural gas prices because U.S. shale production has shifted the location of the U.S. gas supply, decreasing the dependency on natural gas produced from the Gulf of Mexico area, which for decades was the heart of U.S. natural gas production. A reduction in demand from power outages caused by the hurricane, and the arrival of cooler weather has pressured natural gas prices.
