BATON ROUGE, La. – Hurricane Rita smacked a key region for oil-refining with less force than had been feared on Saturday, although there were some early signs of damage.
Pump prices for gasoline and diesel fuel could rise if pipelines and oil refineries are slow to resume operations, and analysts said they were paying close attention to facilities in Lake Charles, La., and Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas.
“There will be some modest disruption of supplies of gasoline and other products,” said William Veno, an analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “But I don’t think it’s going to be as severe a situation as Hurricane Katrina.”
Power outages were reported across wide swaths of Texas and Louisiana, leaving more than a million customers without electricity, and one utility spokeswoman said it could be weeks before service is fully restored.
Valero Energy Corp. said it will take two weeks to a month to repair and restart its Port Arthur refinery, which sustained significant damage to two cooling towers and a flare stack.
Motiva Enterprises Inc. and Citgo Petroleum Corp. reported minor damage to plants in Port Arthur and Lake Charles, respectively. But on a positive note, Exxon Mobil Corp. said it completed a safety assessment and plans to restart it Baytown refinery outside Houston, the nation’s largest.
Valero said the lights were on at its refineries in Houston and Texas City, Texas. And BP PLC spokesman Scott Dean said that was encouraging, since “they’re right next door to us there.”
Marathon Petroleum Co. said its Texas City refinery, which is smaller than the others, has power and sustained only minimal damage.
Before Rita hit, 16 refineries in Texas shut down and evacuated crews. Four refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi remain closed almost a month after Hurricane Katrina, and a significant amount of oil and natural gas output has not returned.
Late Saturday, a natural gas pipeline near the Louisiana coast was leaking in a flooded area, and workers planned to try to fix it today.
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