US Gulf Coast oil patch gets lucky, so far, in busy hurricane season

Thu, October 19, 2023



 Damage is seen around Port Fourchon following Hurricane Ida


By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A very active Atlantic hurricane season so far this year has not sent storms across U.S. oil and natural gas fields in the northern Gulf of Mexico, sparing energy companies billions of dollars of losses and consumers higher fuel costs.

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season has been another in a string with above average activity producing three major hurricanes with winds above 111 mph (179 kph) out of six hurricanes among 20 named tropical storms.

So far this year, only one storm, Tropical Storm Harold, on Aug. 23 disrupted operations at the three refineries in Corpus Christi, Texas, just for a day due to power outages.

That was the biggest impact to the Gulf Coast oil industry this year. Gulf of Mexico offshore operations account for 15% of U.S. crude oil production and 5% of the nation's natural gas production, while about half the country's refining capacity and natural gas processing plant capacity is located along the Gulf coast.

"We got really, really lucky this year," said Colin White, consultant with Rystad Energy in Houston. "But there is still an inherent risk that producers have to take into account."

The hurricane season officially starts on June 1 and ends on Nov. 30.

“I wouldn’t want to say the hurricane season is over, but it is waning,” said Jim Foerster, chief meteorologist for DTN. “This season has been a powerhouse.”

Between 2019 and 2021 storms in the Gulf like Hurricane Ida shut an annual average of 24 million barrels of oil production, said Rystad's White.

At an assumed price of $70 per barrel of oil, that equals an average lost revenue per year of about $1.7 billion, White said.

So far, no offshore production has been hit.

Meanwhile, last year's hurricane season was the first season since 2014 that left most offshore production unaffected, said Troy Vincent, senior oil market analyst for DTN.

Less than 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) of production was shut, Vincent said.

Refiners' view of low-activity hurricane seasons sparing them of crude supply disruption price, however, may change, said Pet Jelinek, Ernst & Young Americas oil and gas leader.

"As we’ve seen in recent years, tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico can have significant impact on energy operations, disrupting energy production, supply chains and pricing," Jelinek said.

"However, the energy system is changing," he added. "Reduced global production of oil and gas has made feedstocks more expensive. The benefits of a milder hurricane season may not be the boon refiners and consumers had once seen."

Atlantic hurricanes are getting stronger faster than they did 40 years ago
Laura Baisas
Thu, October 19, 2023 

On the morning of September 11, 2023, Hurricane Lee (left) churned in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Puerto Rico, with Tropical Storm Margot (right) further to the east.

There is about a month and a half left in the 2023 Atlantic Hurricane season, and it’s a season that has seen some rapidly intensifying storms. In less than 24 hours, Hurricane Idalia went from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 4 with winds near 130 MPH. The storm made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a high Category 3. Weeks later, Hurricane Lee grew from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 in only 24 hours.

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

According to a study published October 19 in the journal Scientific Reports, Atlantic hurricanes may be more than twice as likely to strengthen from a Category 1 storm to a major Category 3 hurricane or higher in a 24-hour period than they were between 1970 and 1990. They also are more likely to strengthen more rapidly along the east coast of the United States.

As ocean temperatures continue to reach record highs due to human-caused climate change, the trend is worrying. Tropical weather systems like hurricanes and tropical storms gain strength over unusually warm sea surface temperatures. Warm ocean water is like carbohydrates for hurricanes and gives the storms more energy. Faster storm intensification has already been linked to climate change, but the changes in the intensification rates of storms across the 41 million square mile wide Atlantic Ocean Basin have been less clear.

“Our oceans have absorbed about 90 percent of the excess warming that has occurred in recent decades due to human-caused climate change,” study co-author and Rowan University climate scientist Andra Garner tells PopSci. “I wanted to see what kinds of changes might already have occurred to the overall rates at which Atlantic hurricanes have been strengthening.”

In the study, Garner looked at every Atlantic hurricane between 1970 and 2020 and analyzed how the wind speed changed over each hurricanes’ lifespan. The storms were split into three time periods–a historical era (1970 to 1990), an intermediate era (1986 to 2005), and a modern era (2001 to 2020). To establish the maximum intensification rate, Garner calculated the greatest increase in wind speed over any 24-hour period within the hurricane’s lifespan.

She found that the chance of a hurricane’s maximum intensification rate being 23 miles per hour or more had increased from 42.3 percent in the historical era to 56.7 percent today. The probability of a weak hurricane strengthening to become a major hurricane in 24 hours also increased from 3.23 percent to 8.12 percent.

“The storms we’ve seen this year, like Hurricane Idalia and Hurricane Lee, align with what my research findings would tell us to expect,” Garner says. “Hurricane Idalia and Hurricane Lee both occurred over exceptionally warm ocean waters, and strengthened quickly as a result of those warm ocean waters (and other favorable conditions). I think that this lines up very well with a trend that my research indicates that we could expect to continue if ocean waters continue to warm.”

[Related: Florida’s aquatic animals prepare early for storms like Hurricane Idalia.]

The locations within the Atlantic Basin where hurricanes were most likely to see their maximum intensification rate has also changed between these eras. Hurricanes were more likely to strengthen most quickly off the Atlantic coast of the US and in the Caribbean Sea, and less likely to strengthen most quickly in the Gulf of Mexico.

Better understanding these locations and intensification rates could help create better action plans for communities at risk. Three of the five of the most economically damaging Atlantic hurricanes have all occurred since 2017 and these storms all had rapid growth. According to Garner, this is an “urgent warning for humanity,” and it should continue without major changes to our behavior and quickly transitioning away from fossil fuels. However, there is still time to act.

“It’s really important to remember that there is absolutely still hope. We know that we are the cause of this problem, which means we can also be the solution—and we already have the tools at our disposal (green energy, etc.) to actually be the solution,” says Garner. “So there’s hope that we could secure a more sustainable future.”