Another reason to worry about a Gulf Coast hurricane around houston (according to Lou Minatti):
Those of you driving Hummers and F250s better hope and pray that it doesn’t. With much of Louisiana’s refining capacity offline due to Katrina, if a hurricane hits the upper Texas coast we’ll lose an additional 26% of the nation’s refineries for a period of time. Unless these computer models are way wrong, watch for energy futures to go crazy again this week.
I remember something poet Wyatt Prunty mentioned to me in a poetry class at Johns Hopkins. He said, “one sign you’re a resident of a place is when you start noticing its weather”).
From a CNN article:
There Tropical Storm Rita had the potential to turn into a hurricane and again pound oil production and refinery capacity along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Private weather tracking service Weather 2000 Inc. estimates that Rita’s path could hit four times as many energy rigs and platforms in the Gulf as Hurricane Katrina and 2004’s Hurricane Ivan combined. Both those storms sparked record oil prices in their wakes.
“With another storm threatening the half the Gulf that avoided Katrina, it has traders spooked this morning,” said oil analyst Peter Beutel of Cameron Hanover about Monday’s sharp rise in oil prices.