LA 1 south of the Leeville Bridge is still closed

(map and pic. from here. Click on each for bigger version)

Why does this matter?

Oil Artery Clog Could Impact U.S. (2003)

Eighteen percent of the entire nation’s energy supply depends on a deteriorating, narrow two-lane road surrounded by water in South Louisiana.

(…)

If LA 1 is impassible, it also halts shrimp and oysters shipments to restaurants across America.

This is the southernmost stretch of Louisiana Highway 1, providing the only land-based access to Port Fourchon, which supports 75 percent of all the deepwater oil and gas production in the Gulf, according to the LA 1 Coalition, comprised of private and public stakeholders intent on saving and improving the roadway.

The Port also is the site of the booster pumps that carry crude oil from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) to underground salt dome storage areas in Galliano, along Highway 1.

Even on a good day, water laps close to the edges of this vital strip of concrete roadway, which not so long ago was surrounded by marshland. Besides its crucial role in the country’s energy supply, the highway serves as the hurricane evacuation route for residents in southern Lafourche Parish and Grand Isle, as well as 6,000 offshore oil and gas employees.

Today, it’s a sitting target for the next big hurricane, which can strike at any time during the annual June 1 to November 30 season.

You don’t believe librul activists? Here’s Norman Mineta:

REMARKS FOR THE HONORABLE NORMAN Y. MINETA SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION – MAY 19, 2005

This small and vulnerable road is the only access route to Port Fourchon – a port that supports close to one-fifth of the Nation’s oil and gas refining capacity and nearly 25 percent of Louisiana’s commercial fishing catch.

Port Fourchon has expanded dramatically in the last 25 years – from 25 acres in 1980 to over 700 acres in 2005. And estimates project that the truck traffic alone on Route 1 will grow by more than 40 percent through 2010.

It is clear that a two-lane road that floods at the sight of rain is no longer adequate to service this vital Gulf port.

(…)

But the only way that these maintenance materials and equipment can make their way to Port Fourchon in the first place is on trucks traveling on LA 1. So when a storm or an accident renders this road impassable, it disrupts operations on the offshore rigs, slowing down oil and gas production and service to maintain the integrity of our pipelines.

If LA 1 is impassible, it also halts shrimp and oysters shipments to restaurants across America.

The shrimp thing was to bring a little bit of levity, but we’re there. With the road closed, it is not possible to get access to the LOOP (the offshore port that handles the super tankers and 1,000,000 b/d worth of oil), and it is not possible to get access to the bases servicing the offshore platforms. It means more delays to assess damages, let alone repair them.

90% of the oil and gas production in the Gulf is currently down, and the LOOP has no power anymore.

And BigOil is not optimistic:

Oil majors count the cost of Katrina

David O’Reilly, Chevron chief executive, said experience of previous hurricanes suggested it could take days to assess accurately the extent of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina even after initial aerial surveys.

“My caution is, don’t count on the initial assessment to tell the whole story,” he said in an interview in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. “It didn’t the last time, and it may not this time. And there’s a lot more damage onshore  to the communities onshore  than there was from [last year’s Hurricane] Ivan.”

He said some people had at first dismissed Ivan’s impact as nothing. “As we really got into it as an industry –  I’m not talking about Chevron alone -… we found lots of challenges, pipelines that had been dislocated, so that even if our platform was up and running we had nowhere to put the oil.”

In total, hurricane Katrina has shut down more than 1.4m barrels of oil a day, about 7 per cent of US demand. The number is almost exactly equal to the maximum amount of spare oil capacity left in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest supplier of oil, which has already offered to increase production to make up for the shortfall. [Yeah right. All they have to offer, if anything at all, is sour oil which cannot easily be used in most refineries. – JaP]

Nearly 2,800 platforms, more than 500 of them manned, were within Katrina’s path. About 1,100 of those platforms were exposed to hurricane force winds in excess of 74 miles an hour, before Katrina faded into a storm.

The Mars platform, one of the Gulf’s biggest producers of oil and gas, has sustained some damage, Royal Dutch Shell, the operator, said. But not only production wells have been affected.

Exploration rigs, of which there are almost no spares available worldwide because of surging demand from oil companies keen to cash in on the high oil prices, were also within the path of Katrina.  

More than half of the 231 rigs exploring for oil in the Gulf were hit by Katrina. Overall 117 rigs, valued at a total of $7bn (€5.7bn, £3.9bn) had to weather the storm, rigzone said.  

Valero, a top US refiner, estimates it will be up to two weeks before its St Charles refinery can re-start: the facility still has no power, experienced 3ft of flood water in some units and will have to repair pumps, electric motors and electrical switchgear. Valero also suffered minor damage to its cooling towers, and insulation was knocked off several tanks.

“We do not know when employees will be allowed to return to the area and begin reporting back to work,”

HiD provided a more upbeat assessment of the situation on the refining front, but the loss of oil production and imports could last much longer.

And that’s of course in addition to all the desolation, destruction anddeath that we have yet to assess.