HOUSTON -- More gas stations opened across the Houston area Thursday, though demand remained high five days after Hurricane Ike came ashore and some ran dry hours after being restocked, reported The Houston Chronicle. Shell Oil Co. said Thursday that 70% of its company-branded stations were open in Houston and Beaumont—more than 360 of the total. Valero Energy opened nearly 20 more for a total of 109. Other companies green-lighted more as power restoration efforts allowed, and more than 60% of the region's Chevron stations were back in business.
"With great effort, we are maintaining [image-nocss] supply, however strained, at our fuel supply terminals in the region," Chevron said in a statement. "Additional Chevron trucks have arrived into the affected region and are refueling Chevron and Texaco retail stations."
Other major oil companies said the same thing and looked toward regaining some normalcy within a few days as more stations regain power and the post-Ike demand spike begins to fall back. "We are hopeful the fuel supply at Shell-branded stations in Houston and Beaumont will return to normal sometime this weekend, assuming power continues to be restored," Shell said.
Power was restored Thursday to several more of the 14 refineries that shut down before Ike came ashore, allowing them to move forward with damage assessments and look toward restarting, said the report.
Fuel shortages continued elsewhere, however. For example, the gasoline shortage that has plagued Middle Tennessee for more than a week, and which took a turn for the worse Friday, will probably persist for at least several days, state and industry officials said, according to The Alexandria Town Talk. At least 85% of the stations in the Nashville, Tenn., area were without gasoline Friday morning, AAA Auto Club South estimated, and those that had it were running out quickly, despite regular deliveries to the region.
"This has been a tough time as the gasoline shortage has put a strain on all of us for the past several days," Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen said in a statement late Friday. "For the next few days we will continue to see supply shortages, so I encourage motorists to conserve gas as much as possible."
"Everybody has just gone nuts," Mike Williams, executive director of the Tennessee Petroleum Council, told United Press International, calling the rumor a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Randy Bly, a spokesperson for AAA, told the newspaper, "Until the pipeline can get filled with a good supply of gasoline, it's going to be a couple of days of roughing it in terms of gasoline."
The shortage began shortly before Ike made landfall near Galveston, Texas, a week ago. The hurricane delivered a glancing blow to the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, but it nonetheless managed to knock out power to many of the refineries in that area. Those refineries supply much of the gasoline for Middle Tennessee. The gasoline is transported to the region, but spurs off a single pipeline, the Colonial Pipeline, also send gasoline to most of the Southeast.
A Colonial spokesperson said Friday that deliveries to Nashville had returned to levels that preceded hurricanes Ike and Gustav, which hit Louisiana earlier this month. But because gasoline travels the pipeline at an average speed of 3 to 5 miles per hour, it could be several more days before Nashville's supply fully catches up to demand, industry officials said.
The lengthy shortage has meant that even the least panicked of drivers have started to run low of fuel, and on Friday, drivers started flocking to stations as soon as tanker trucks had arrived, the report said. State and industry officials say stockpiling on the eve of the storm, followed by a sharp drop in fuel deliveries to the state, appear to be the root causes of the problem.
Even after gas station operators raised prices to more than $4 a gallon and supplies ran low, Middle Tennessee drivers have bought twice as much gasoline as normal in the past week, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said, citing data compiled by the Tennessee Oil Marketers Association.
The shortage appears to exist in only a few isolated pockets along the Colonial Pipeline, AAA said. Reports of tight supply also have come in from Charlotte, N.C., and parts of the Atlanta metro area, but other cities, including Birmingham, Ala., and Knoxville, have bounced back to normal. The shortage has not hit the Memphis area, which receives its gasoline from a different source, said the report. The area is connected to the Capline pipeline, which starts far from Ike's devastation in St. James, La., and much of its gasoline is refined in the Memphis area itself.
Tanker trucks and barges have been delivering some fuel to Middle Tennessee from places where there have not been shortages, but neither method can match the Colonial Pipeline's capacity, which can carry more than 100 million gallons of refined gasoline a day. State officials have been working with the Department of Energy to reroute shipments to Tennessee, said the report. They also have been monitoring state fuel supplies to ensure there is enough gasoline for fire engines, ambulances and other emergency vehicles.
Stations in Central Virginia are also battling supply problems, reported NBC 29 News, many of them running out of gasoline all together. Station owners said they expect the supply to get back to pre-storm levels and for prices to re-adjust within the next few weeks.
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