(New throughout, adds details and updates storm damage and
outages)
By Laura Sanicola
Sept 14 (Reuters) - The largest U.S. fuel line shut down on
Tuesday due to power outages caused by Nicholas, which made
landfall as a hurricane before weakening on Tuesday, the second
U.S. Gulf storm in as many weeks.
Rains, flooding and power outages were affecting Texas and
Louisiana, which were still trying to recover from Hurricane
Ida, which knocked most U.S. Gulf offshore oil and gas
production offline. Power outages in the Houston area caused
Colonial to pre-emptively shut down its main gasoline and
distillate fuel lines, the company said in a notice to shippers.
Nicholas was about 10 miles (15 km) southeast of Houston by
10 a.m. Central Time (1400 GMT), heading northeast with maximum
sustained winds of 45 miles per hour (75 km per hour), the
National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in a bulletin.
The storm caused widespread power outages as it crossed over
the Houston metropolitan area late Monday night and early
Tuesday morning. About 485,000 customers were without power in
Texas.
Colonial supplies roughly 2.5 million barrels a day of
refined products to some of the busiest U.S. fuel markets,
mostly in the Southeast and East Coast. The line also shut
during Ida, but was restarted without incident a few days after
the storm landed.
More than 40% of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas
output remained offline on Monday, two weeks after Hurricane Ida
slammed into the Louisiana coast, according to offshore
regulator Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE).
Shell, which saw significant damage to facilities in
Louisiana, said it shut production at its Perdido oil platform
on Monday night due to heavy winds, and was ready to restart
once a downstream facility operated by a third party restored
power. The company had no plans to return staff to the facility
on Tuesday.
Some 14 inches of rain fell in Galveston while Houston got
almost six inches overnight and into the morning, the National
Weather Service reported. Nicholas, which landed in Texas, had a
much less pronounced effect than Ida on Gulf Coast refining
capacity.
Most Texas refiners were operating on Tuesday. Motiva
Enterprises' 607,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Port
Arthur, Texas refinery - the largest in the United States - was
operating normally as Nicholas was passing over the area on
Tuesday morning, said sources familiar with plant operations.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc's 302,800 bpd joint-venture
Deer Park, Texas refinery was also operating normally on
Tuesday, as was Exxon's Baytown and Beaumont refineries.
Texas energy company CenterPoint Energy Inc said on
Tuesday that about 400,000 homes and businesses in its
Houston-area service territory were without power.
Vessel traffic was idled on Tuesday morning at the Houston
Ship Channel and the Calcasieu Ship Channel. The ports of
Houston, Freeport, Galveston and Texas City were open with
restrictions, however, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Some shippers expect the restrictions set by Texas and
Louisiana ports while Nicholas passes through will add to
ongoing import and export delays from Ida.
(Reporting by Laura Sanicola; additional reporting by Erwin
Seba and Arpan Varghese; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and David
Gregorio)
