Hurricane Redux – Ike and Energy Infrastructure

August and September have been a busy time for hurricanes throughout the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Seemed like we just finished posts on Gustav and Hanna – now we have Ike. As part of our hurricane tracking we’ve been pairing different hurricane indicators with critical energy infrastructure (see the earlier blog on Gustav ) Now, Ike is making its turn as the newest hurricane and looks to hit the coast of Texas in the upcoming days. For this post we’ve shared a new hurricane impact indicator – wind speed probabilities. This provides a more detailed threat indicator of possible intensity and resulting damage from the storm. We’ve also taken the latest data from the MMS on oil and gas production levels for active wells in the Gulf of Mexico. The map below shows a few of the data sets we’ve put together thus far:

The wind speeds are color coded from orange being the highest to blue being the lowest. Daily oil production levels are indicated by the size of the white circles. Looks like several high production deep water wells could be in the path of high winds and possibly high wave heights as well. Although most assessments have the storm veering south of the majority of wells and platforms.

According to the latest MMS press-release nearly 63% of platforms and rigs have been shutdown resulting in reductions of more than 90% of Gulf produced oil (nearly 1 mill barrels shortfall) and 70% of gas production.
…
“From the operators’ reports, it is estimated that approximately 95.9 % of the oil production in the Gulf has been shut-in. Estimated current oil production from the Gulf of Mexico is 1.3 million barrels of oil per day. It is also estimated that approximately 73.1 % of the natural gas production in the Gulf has been shut-in. Estimated current natural gas production from the Gulf of Mexico is 7.4 billion cubic feet of gas per day.”

Asian Energy reports that four natural gas pipelines have been shut in as a result of Ike as well.

Relevant data sets available on Finder! for download.

NOAA, Forecast of Hurricane Ike’s high wind probabilities for next 120 hours, World, 09/11/2008

National Weather Service, Hurricane Ike Predicted Movement, World, 9.10.2008 – 9.15.2008

MMS, Major Shipping Fairways in the Gulf of Mexico (Line), World, 2008

Wikipedia, Global Oil Refineries, World, 2.3.2004

MMS, Active Pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, World, 2008

MMS, Top Oil Producing Wells, Gulf of Mexico, 8/22/2008

MMS, Top Gas Producing Wells, Gulf of Mexico, 8/22/2008

ps – @James, yes, we’ll have a real Maker and not screen shots very soon – polish polish polish Although I did think the hurricane wind predictions made a damn purty map – even static. Last but not least many thanks to Kevin “the Rage” Burke who did all the real work for this post (nobody really knows what I do here anymore).