About 11% of US Gulf of Mexico oil production has been shut-in as
operators evacuate platforms in the possible path of a tropical
depression expected to pass through the Central-Eastern and Eastern
Gulf of Mexico, the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental
Enforcement (BSEE) said Monday.
Offshore operator reports submitted to BSEE as of late Monday
morning show operators had shut-in a total 168,334 b/d of oil output
as they evacuated crews from a total of six production platforms,
the agency said in a statement. There is a total of 781 manned
platforms in the US Gulf.
Total Gulf of Mexico production was almost 1.62 million b/d in May,
the latest month for which data was available from the Energy
Information Administration.
Tropical Depression 9 is currently off the west coast of Cuba, but
the National Hurricane Center expects it to become a tropical storm
on Tuesday and veer to the northwest. It is then forecast to head to
the northeast and could make landfall in western Florida later in
the week, the NHC said. BSEE said shut-in production figures are
estimates based on the amount of oil and natural gas the companies
plan to produce that day.
Operators have also shut in about 190,000 Mcf/d of gas output,
BSEE said, or 5.51% of total US Gulf gas production.
--Starr Spencer,
starr.spencer@platts.com
--Edited by Keiron Greenhalgh,
keiron.greenhalgh@spglobal.com
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