Hurricane Isaias, the first Atlantic hurricane of the season, is expected to make landfall on Friday evening near the Alabama Gulf Coast and Florida panhandle.
Days ago, the oil industry around the U.S. Gulf Coast started preparing. A segment of the nation's oil infrastructure — like oil rigs and platforms — operates in the region, although the majority of it is further west, towards western Louisiana and Texas.
Although oil experts are not anticipating major disruptions, oil companies have been taking precautions. Shell and BP have evacuated personnel from offshore facilities close to the storm's path, mainly deepwater platforms. Chevron has evacuated offshore drilling rigs close to the storm's path, and plans to redeploy them once the storm has passed.
In an emailed statement, Exxon told NPR they are "closely monitoring the weather. Operations are normal."
But so far, the storm seems like it will skirt most facilities. The storm's path "could be worse," said Debnil Chowdhury, head of Americas refining at S&P Global Energy. After all, the storm is heading east, and not west, toward where the bulk of oil operations — like refineries — are located.
The storm is "making a swooping turn, almost just to the east of where the most significant infrastructure is," said Bryan Domangue, the Gulf of America region director for the federal Marine Minerals Administration, who oversees offshore oil and natural gas production. "At this point, it's swept just a little south of some of our major deepwater oil and gas facilities, and then it's hugging the eastern boundary of where the infrastructure is."
He added that in addition to evacuating people who work on oil rigs and platforms, which are normal storm precautions, oil operators are doing things like shutting off safety valves below the ocean floor, and moving mobile drilling facilities when possible.
Of course, it's not unprecedented for the oil industry to face hurricanes. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in 2005, remain some of the most destructive in the oil and gas industry's history. Nearly 3,000 platforms were in the path of the storms and Katrina destroyed 47 platforms. Other, more recent, hurricanes have not been as destructive but have halted production or reduced capacity — such as Hurricane Francine in 2024, Hurricane Ida in 2021, and Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Another risk is what would happen if the storm became severe enough to make refineries — which are on land — go offline, analysts told NPR. If a hurricane knocks out the power, or if a refinery floods, it can take a while to get running again. It's more complicated than restarting an oil rig or mobile drilling operations.
"Restarting these things is like starting up an old car," said Carl Larry, a manager at Enverus, an energy data and research provider, even if the shutdown is short. "If you did anything in the world, anything in your life, 24/7, stop doing it for one day," he continued, "you're going to have the shakes."
He says, this is because refineries are vast and complex. They boil oil down into molecules that are turned into diesel, gasoline, or natural gas liquids like propane. Pipelines carry crude oil in and refined products out. And they have to be heated. "Every one of those little steps is built on power that's generated through the facility on a constant 24/7 basis," Larry said. If that power is switched off, the process takes time to restart.
There are two significant refineries on the hurricane's path — the Chevron Pascagoula location and the Vertex Alabama refinery. Representatives of these refineries did not return requests for comment about their storm preparations, but Ross Allen, a spokesperson for Chevron, told NPR that generally speaking, refineries prepare for storms by trying to mitigate flood risk.
Chowdhury of S&P Global Energy said these two refineries "account for about 2.5% of total U.S. refining capacity and about 5% the Gulf Coast refining capacity. And Pascagoula specifically is very important to supplying airports throughout the southeast."
While those numbers may not sound big, the global supply of diesel and gas is short, due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine. So every little bit counts. American refineries are operating at 92.7% capacity, refining about 17 million barrels of crude a day.
