Hacked Pipeline May Stay Shut for Days, Raising Concerns About Fuel Supply

Goldman Sachs, in a report on Sunday, said that since there was no physical damage to the pipeline, higher fuel prices on the East Coast were “likely to be transient.”

Experts said several airports that depend on the pipeline for jet fuel, including Nashville, Tenn.; Baltimore-Washington; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., could have a hard time later in the week. Airports generally store enough jet fuel for three to five days of operations.

White House officials held meetings on the pipeline attack over the weekend. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in a tweet that they are looking for ways to “mitigate potential disruptions to supply.”

To ease the impact, the Transportation Department on Sunday lifted some restrictions on the transport of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel by road to address what it called “emergency conditions.”

One reason that prices have not surged more so far is that the East Coast generally has ample supplies of fuel in storage. And fuel consumption, while growing, remains depressed from prepandemic levels.

Still, there are some vulnerabilities in the supply system. Stockpiles in the Southeast are slightly lower than normal for this time of year. Refinery capacity in the Northeast is limited, and the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve, a supply held for emergency interruptions, contains only a total of one million barrels of gasoline in New York, Boston and South Portland, Maine.

That is not even enough for a single day of average regional consumption, according to a report published on Saturday by Clearview Energy Partners, a research firm based in Washington. “Much depends on the duration of the outage,” the report said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/business/energy-environment/colonial-pipeline-shutdown-gasoline.html