As Louisiana and the nation observes the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this weekend,
a new federal analysis says hurricanes no longer pose as much of a threat to domestic production as they once did since the shale boom reduced the United States’ reliance on oil and gas extracted offshore.
As FuelFix.com reports, advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling fueled a shale drilling bonanza on U.S. soil that has filled the nation’s storage tanks with more fossil fuel than the country can use. With so much oil and gas coming from oil fields spread across the country, the U.S. is no longer so dependent on getting its energy sources from the Gulf of Mexico.
In 2003, the Gulf of Mexico produced 27% of the nation’s crude oil output, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says. A decade later, that share had dropped to 16%. Natural gas production from the Gulf tumbled from a high of 26% in 1997 to just 4% in 2014.
In recent years, energy companies have experienced relatively few disruptions because of tropical storms and hurricanes. There were no storm-related shut-ins last year, the EIA says.
U.S. oil production may be less vulnerable to hurricanes, but about half the nation’s refining sector is located along the U.S. Gulf Coast, which is especially susceptible to storms. Still, the ability to tap into huge stockpiles of crude oil, both in the U.S. and stored across the world, could offset any weather-related supply disruptions, the EIA says. And the U.S has boosted its natural gas processing capacity in areas away from the Gulf Coast, lessening the potential for processing outages caused by hurricanes and tropical storms.
