By Marianna Parraga, Arathy Somasekhar and Erwin Seba
HOUSTON (Reuters) – Oil and gas companies in Texas were restarting operations on Tuesday after Hurricane Beryl lashed the state with 80-mph winds, damaging property and leaving millions of people without power.
Beryl made landfall early on Monday near the coastal town of Matagorda. Some energy firms shut operations ahead of its arrival and Texas’ largest ports and navigation channels closed. But its impact on oil and gas production is expected to be minor.
On Tuesday, ports were set to reopen, and some producers and facilities were ramping up output after preventively cutting down processing. Some were limited by slow restoration of power to homes, businesses and industrial customers.
About 2.8 million customers remained without power in Texas late on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us, including some 2 million served by the state’s largest provider, CenterPoint Energy.
The figure was more than double the number of customers that lost power in May when a weather event bringing strong winds hit Houston. It took more than a week for those outages to be resolved in some city neighborhoods.
CenterPoint, which said the hurricane resulted in “widespread power outages,” warned customers that the power interruptions might last for several days due to the severity of the storm.
WATER UP AND DOWN
Texas is the largest U.S. oil and gas producing state, accounting for some 40% of oil and 20% of gas output, and is also a major shipping and refining hub. Any weather-related interruption could have an impact on crude and fuel production levels, as well as imports and exports.
However, flooding in city regions was expected to ease as water began receding quickly after Beryl’s severe rainfall, which surpassed 11 inches in some areas south of Houston.
Most refineries in Houston and Texas City are designed to maintain operations even amid heavy rainfall, but some of those facilities, ports and other energy infrastructure can develop problems from sustained power interruptions, according to experts.
Phillips 66 said on Monday its Lake Charles, Louisiana and Sweeny, Texas refineries had power and were operating, while Citgo Petroleum temporarily reduced production over the weekend at its 165,000-bpd Corpus Christi plant.
Formosa Plastics said on Monday it had temporarily shut down operations at its Point Comfort plant site.
The Port of Corpus Christi reopened ship navigation on Monday afternoon, but the Port of Houston said its terminals would remain closed on Tuesday after conducting a preliminary assessment of facilities and systems.
Freeport LNG, the third largest liquefied natural gas facility in the U.S., has not provided an operational update since it said it ramped-down production on Sunday.
Beryl is expected to gradually lose strength and become a tropical depression, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Monday. The storm was moving north-northeastward before accelerating across the lower Mississippi Valley into the Ohio Valley in the next days.
(Reporting by Marianna Parraga, Arathy Somasekhar and Erwin Seba in Houston; Editing by Liz Hampton and David Gregorio)
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