The Texas energy industry braced for Hurricane Beryl’s impact on Monday, with threats from the powerful storm forcing the closure of key oil and gas shipping ports, slowing refining and prompting the evacuation of some production sites.
Beryl, which made landfall near Matagorda, Texas, packing maximum sustained winds of 80 miles per hour (129 kilometers an hour), posed problems for the heart of the country’s energy sector.
Located about 85 miles south-southwest of Houston, Texas, the storm’s center was forecast to move over eastern Texas on Monday, before passing over the Lower Mississippi Valley into the Ohio Valley later in the week, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Monday.
Texas produces the most oil and natural gas, or more than 40% and 20%, respectively, of any area of the United States.
Over the weekend, the port of Corpus Christi, the country’s leading crude oil export hub, closed operations and vessel traffic in preparation for Beryl. The ports of Houston, Galveston, Freeport and Texas City were also shut ahead of the storm making landfall.
Chemical company Chemours Co said on Sunday that it was prepared to adjust staffing and secure equipment during and after the storm passed, while Freeport LNG said it had its hurricane preparedness plan in place.
Enbridge Inc, which runs crude oil export facilities near Corpus Christi, also said it had activated emergency plans for assets along or near the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Citgo Petroleum Corp, meanwhile, was reducing production over the weekend at its 165,000 barrel-per-day Corpus Christi, Texas, refinery, sources said.
Producers, including Shell and Chevron, also shut in production or evacuated personnel from their Gulf of Mexico offshore platforms.
More than 26,000 homes and businesses were without power in Texas as of Sunday evening, according to PowerOutage.us.
Texas-based electric utility CenterPoint said in an email that it was “closely monitoring the situation and making preparations.”
The storm is forecast to turn north-eastward and move farther inland over eastern Texas and Arkansas late Monday and Tuesday.
(Reporting by Marriana Paragga, Erwin Seba, Arathy Somaasekhar; Additional reporting by Kavya Balaraman in Bengaluru; Writing by Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Bernadette Baum)