With crews heading back to their platforms and no refineries reporting any outages, it appears that the impact of Tropical Storm Lee on the New Orleans-area oil industry has peaked and is now waning.
The risk from power outages affecting pipelines and gas processing plants also appears over, as Louisiana's primary utility Entergy reported Sunday morning less than 10,000 homes in its region without power.
No refining companies have reported outages, and at least one, ConocoPhillips, specifically noted on its website that its New Orleans-area facilities were operating as normal.
Shell said Saturday that it was returning some of its workers to platforms in the western Gulf of Mexico, but that the central Gulf platforms remained shut. It reiterated that on Sunday.
ExxonMobil said Sunday it was returning workers to its platforms.
As far as production, it rose slightly over the last 24 hours, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. BOEM reported Sunday that oil production outages had decreased slightly between Saturday and Sunday, to 843,223 b/d from 844,190 b/d. That calculates to a Saturday shutdown of capacity at 60.3%; on Sunday, it was 60.2%. Natural gas output recorded a more dramatic increase between Saturday and Sunday. The Saturday outages were 2,895 MMCF/d, or 54.6% of Gulf capacity. A day later, the corresponding figures were 2,345 MMCF/d, or 44.3%.
A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Offshore Oil Platform, the only facility able to take in offloadings of VLCCs, said LOOP remained shut. It extends 18 miles into the Gulf of Mexico.
