The price of Oil

Mover Mike has a link to some info on just how bad the damage was from Katrina and Rita. He links to this article in Lubbock Online. (registration is required but Bug Me Not comes through yet again!)

Oil production in Gulf still at only one-sixth capacity
The Gulf of Mexico's offshore petroleum industry is far from recovering from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and at least one-sixth of the region's normal daily oil production will still be off line at the start of next storm season, a federal agency says.

Katrina and Rita destroyed 115 of the Gulf's 4,000 production platforms and damaged another 52, according to a report released Thursday by the Minerals Management Service, which manages federal offshore leases.

The storms' combined fury - much stronger when they swept across the Gulf than when they hit shore - also damaged 183 pipelines, including 64 classified as major. As of Thursday, only 22 had been returned to service, the MSS said.

There are about 33,000 miles of petroleum pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, 22,000 miles of which were exposed to the two storms.

As of this week, the MMS said 396,000 of the Gulf's normal daily production of 1.5 million barrels of oil were being kept from market because of storm damage, along with 1.8 billion cubic feet of the region's normal daily production of 10 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Future repair work will be slow, the MMS projected.

"For a long-term projection, approximately 255,000 barrels a day and 400 million cubic feet of gas a day will probably not be restored to production prior to the start of the 2006 hurricane season," the report said.

Hurricane season begins June 1.

The Minerals Management Service is an agency that I have not heard of before. Their home page is here, the Gulf division page is here and the Katrina/Rita Report is here (PDF file) The MMS also seems to have their fingers in the off-shore alt.energy pie with this page on Renewable Energy.