Repairs shut in half of gulf rigs

Houston Chronicle:

Three weeks after Hurricane Ike came ashore, nearly half of the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas production remains shut in as pipelines and gas processing plants undergo repairs.

The Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which regulates oil and gas activity in the Gulf, said Friday that 48.2 percent of oil production and 44.6 percent of natural gas output remains shut in, meaning valves below the seabed are shut to block the flow.

Agency spokesman Bill Lee acknowledged that platform operators in the affected areas stand ready to ramp up production, particularly deep-water installations that largely emerged unscathed from Ike with no significant damage.

Ike's storm surge destroyed 52 smaller platforms closer to shore that were producing a combined 13,300 barrels of oil and 90 million cubic feet of gas per day, a fraction of the Gulf's normal output of 1.3 million barrels of oil and 7.4 billion cubic feet of gas.

Another 73 platforms sustained extensive to moderate damage, but the Minerals Management Service has yet to release details on those structures.

The only significant deep-water damage reported so far was the loss of the derrick on the drilling rig atop BP's Mad Dog platform 190 miles south of New Orleans.

But some pipeline systems that needed to bring output to shore remain shut down for post-storm repairs, as do five of 39 onshore natural gas processing plants that were in Ike's path.

Rick Rainey, spokesman for Enterprise Products Partners, said Friday that the worst damage the company found among its Gulf pipeline systems was a severed 42-inch diameter segment of the High Island Offshore System. Engineers don't know how it was severed, Rainey said.

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What you don't see in this report is any indication of environmental damage. It is likely that there has been none, because if there had been that would probably be the lead in the story. What that suggest to me is that the fear mongering of environmentalist over offshore drilling is not based on facts, but on their general hatred of energy in general.