08 October 2013, News Wires – Operators have continued restaffing platforms and restarting production after Tropical Storm Karen dissipated on Sunday leaving little damage in its wake.
About three-quarters of the US Gulf’s platform facilities had been restaffed, with 138 still evacuated, the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said.
Seven drilling rigs were still evacuated but dynamically positioned units that had moved off-site had returned to place.
A total of 35.08% of US Gulf production, or 491,162 barrels of oil per day, remained offline. As for natural gas output, 36.78% or 1.39 billion cubic feet remained shut in, the BSEE said on a makeshift web page being used during the US government shutdown.
Crude oil futures on both sides of the Atlantic pared losses on Monday after a sharp drop in earlier trade, Reuters reported, following a report that a key pipeline delivering crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma, had resumed shipping after an earlier outage.
Storm warnings had prompted energy firms to shut in nearly two-thirds of oil output and half of natural gas production as of Saturday.
“Karen did not do any serious damage and I think Gulf production is going to come back online, and that’s weighing on WTI,” Gene McGillian, an analyst at Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut, told the news wire.
US crude oil slipped $0.81 to settle at $103.03 a barrel, after trading close to $2 a barrel lower at $101.86 earlier in the session, according to Reuters data.
Brent crude futures reversed earlier losses to finish up $0.22 at $109.68 per barrel, after earlier trading as low as $107.89.
Gulf of Mexico production sums to about 1.3 million bpd, almost a fifth of US oil output.
– Upstream