, Columnist
The Southeast Can Take Harvey's Colonial Pipeline Cutoff ... For Now
The region has a decent cushion of oil in storage to help it weather the storm.
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It is clear by now that Hurricane Harvey's biggest impact on the U.S. energy industry concerns logistics rather than raw supply. Prices tell the story succinctly:
Roughly half of that weekly gain in gasoline prices came on Thursday morning alone. The reason was news that the Colonial Pipeline was shutting down. Colonial is one of the most critical pieces of energy infrastructure in the U.S., able to transport about 2.5 million barrels a day of products such as gasoline and distillate from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, supplying big demand centers stretching from Atlanta to New York City. But with about one-sixth of U.S. refining capacity offline in the Gulf region, the barrels to fill the pipeline just aren't there.