ENERGY

The Perfect Storm?

Just In Case We Needed Another Reason to Kick Our Oil Addiction

Maybe it’s just that I’m pessimistic. Or a weather nerd. Or someone who has been paying far too much money to drive around Los Angeles lately.

But as I’ve watched Hurricane Dolly form in the Gulf of Mexico and careen towards the Texas-Mexico border—rapidly intensifying into a Category 2 storm just before landfall–I can only think one thing. If we’re worried about gas prices now, what will we do if (God forbid) at some point over the next several months, one or more Gulf hurricanes knock out oil production infrastructure and refining capacity?

Such a hypothetical disaster has already been discussed this year, based upon our alarming experience from the mega hurricane year of 2005. The Gulf of Mexico provides 30 percent of U.S. oil production and 45 percent of its refining capacity, according to the American Petroleum Institute. No wonder that after Hurricane Katrina shut down virtually all Gulf production in 2005, we saw average gas prices jump above $3 a gallon for the first time, climbing from $2.65 to $3.11 in the space of a week. (At the time, such a price was considered shocking.)

It’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And then a month later came Hurricane Rita, another Category 5 aimed at oil rich Gulf waters and coasts. Taken together the two storms damaged 457 oil pipelines, destroyed 113 platforms, and most important, temporarily shut down oil production entirely. As the U.S. Minerals Management Service puts it, Katrina and Rita represented “the greatest natural disasters to oil and gas development in the history of the Gulf of Mexico.” Overall roughly three-quarters of total Gulf oil platforms were in the path of one or both storms, as were two-thirds of the region’s miles of pipeline.

To be sure, after the storms passed gas prices once again declined steadily, as production capacity in the Gulf gradually came back online and President Bush released oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The American Petroleum Institute assures us its companies worked as hard as possible to recover quickly.

The vulnerability of our economy to oil price spikes at that time, however, was nothing compared to what it is now. Today we would kill for $3 a gallon at the pump, and the entire stock market swoons over any increase in oil prices. Some forecasts suggest price spikes in the event of another well-targeted Gulf hurricane could be as high as $5 to $6 per gallon. We’re much more panicky now: Could we really withstand a price blip like the one that occurred after Katrina?

That’s something to consider, because every indicator right now is that this hurricane season is something to worry about. We’re not in the August-October peak of the season yet, but we’ve already seen four named storms this year and two strong hurricanes—far ahead of the typical schedule. In particular, although the recently dissipated Hurricane Bertha didn’t ultimately cause much impact upon any land areas, it showed record longevity and near-record intensity for a storm occurring so early in the year. Bertha could represent a harbinger of a still-more active season once Atlantic sea surface temperatures reach their peak. The calling card of the deadly 2005 hurricane season, after all, was a hyperactive month of July.

Meanwhile, Dolly has already required a few platforms to be evacuated, although most recently oil prices have declined, based in part upon the anticipation that the storm’s track will not pose a severe danger to production. But another storm this year certainly might.

Granted, we shouldn’t get too alarmist: Neither 2006 nor 2007 saw anything like the hurricane destruction that befell the U.S. in 2005. Hopefully we’ll be spared this year too—but we won’t be forever. And so I believe it’s worth raising questions like these in order to get a true and full assessment of our economy’s vulnerability due to our staggering dependence upon oil.

And for that matter, why only focus on the danger to our economy posed by Gulf of Mexico hurricanes? Last year, a rare Arabian Sea cyclone, Gonu, very nearly made its way into the Persian Gulf—if it had, a true oil economy disaster could have been in the offing. And in fact, some climate models now suggest that global warming ought to increase the occurrence of hurricanes in the Arabian Sea.

For indeed, oil production and hurricanes may ultimately be linked via climate change—the burning of oil warms the climate, which provides more ocean heat for hurricanes, which can then (as we’ve seen) temporarily wipe out production of the oil. We’re still waiting for a definitive understanding of the precise hurricane-climate relationship, but it remains a reasonable assumption that the storms will get worse on average.

None of which is to say that we ought to burn less oil to prevent global warming so as to (in turn) prevent hurricanes. That’s strained logic indeed, given the amount of warming we’re already committed to and the fact that hurricanes will always be with us, irrespective of what the climate is doing.

However, it is perhaps to say that burning less oil in the future—and instead turning to alternative power sources—would reduce the impact of inevitable hurricane catastrophes on our wallets. And these days, that kind of reasoning sounds more and more compelling.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Tags: Energy, environment, NOAA, oceans

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