Stories tagged with "gas shortage"

Gasoline Shortages: Our Inventory Problem

Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 29, 2008 - 9:31am
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: gas inventories, gas shortage, gasoline, gasoline price, original, peak oil [list all tags]

I am writing this article from Atlanta, one of the places hardest hit by gasoline shortages. A person can drive for miles without finding an open gas station.

One of the major reasons for gas shortages is that fact that inventories were not very high going into the hurricanes. Then when not one, but two, hurricanes hit, inventories dropped to the level where there wasn't enough to go around. (In fact, the shortages started even before the second hurricane hit.) How could this happen? Isn't there anyone who cares about gasoline inventories?


Figure 1. US Gasoline Inventories, Based on US Energy Information Administration Data

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Gas Shortages?: This Week in Petroleum - September 24

Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 26, 2008 - 9:00am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: gas shortage, gasoline shortage, hurricane gustav, hurricane ike, original, refineries, twip [list all tags]

Gasoline shortages are starting to become a problem in the Southern US in areas such as Nashville and Atlanta. This week's "This Week in Petroleum" (TWIP) (included in its entirety under the fold) did indeed show a big drop in gasoline inventory as we expected, but we are still digesting the impact, keeping in mind that these are averaged numbers over four weeks--which of course begs the question of whether or not the full impact of the refinery outages we have seen are in these numbers or not.

In this post, I have prepared a few graphs to supplement this week's TWIP. We know that Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike had a huge impact on refineries, and that these production shortfalls are now slowly making their way through pipelines. It is my view that because Texas refineries have been fairly slow to get back online, and because of the built-in lag due to the slow travel of refined products through pipelines, the present gasoline shortages are likely to get worse in the next two to three weeks.

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Implications of a Ten Day Refinery Outage

Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 15, 2008 - 9:24am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: diesel, gas shortage, gasoline, hurricane gustav, hurricane ike, jet fuel, original, peak oil, refineries [list all tags]

Where is our gasoline and diesel supply headed? Even before Ike hit, quite a few areas of the US were starting to see gasoline shortages. The impact of Ike can only make shortages worse. Most likely, it will take refineries at least a week or two to get production back to normal levels after a storm of this type, considering the impacts of electrical outages and flooding. In this article, I will examine some of the issues that seem to be involved. Based on my analysis, fuel supply shortages are likely to last well into October, and are likely to get considerably worse before they get better.

Insight 1. Even before Hurricane Ike hit, inventories were very low.


FIgure 1. EIA Graph of Gasoline Inventories

According to EIA data, gasoline inventories the week that Hurricane Gustav hit were the lowest that they had been since 2000, amounting to 187.9 million barrels, or about 21 days supply. Quite a bit of this inventory is needed just to keep the pipelines filled. EIA does not publish information as to how far inventories need to drop before we start seeing outages, but it is clear that we have now reached the point where shortages are developing.

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Turkmenistan learns a lesson

Posted by Heading Out on January 15, 2008 - 10:00am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: china, gas shortage, gazprom, iran, ireland, kazakhstan, natural gas, russia, turkey, turkmenistan, uzbekistan [list all tags]

There has been the occasional story popping up in Drumbeat over this past week or so about the severe winter and gas shortages in Iran, and their resulting cut in supplies to Turkey. The Iranian domestic shortage was supposed to be made up from Turkmenistan. Unfortunately the shortfall from Iran to Turkey was supposed to be made up by increased supplies from Russia, but those also are falling short. About a year ago we saw some of the same discussion about supplies from Turkmenistan, through Russia, to Europe, with shortfalls and price increases – particularly relating to the gas supplies to Ukraine, through which the pipelines flow. At the end of that discussion the Turkmen got an increase in the price of their gas. It is therefore not surprising to see that Turkmenistan is seeking to double the price it gets from Iran.

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