Big Oil evacuates Gulf in face of storm

The top operators in the Gulf of Mexico evacuated workers from most of their deepwater platforms Wednesday in response to this hurricane season’s first major storm in the region.

The potential hurricane, which would be named Barry, was strengthening into a tropical storm Thursday, expected to travel westward along the Gulf Coast to Louisiana and possibly farther to Texas. New Orleans already was suffering major flooding Wednesday.

The Gulf ’s leading producers — BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron — evacuated most of their offshore personnel and shut down oil and gas output at many of their wells in preparation for the storm.

About a third of the Gulf ’s nearly 2 million barrels of daily oil production is coming offline for a few days, the federaal goverment said. That has helped boost oil prices in the near term.

Oil prices, also lifted by a drop in U.S. crude inventories, gained more than 4 percent in New York on Wednesday to settle at $60.43 a barrel — the highest close since May.

Several other large Gulf producers such as Anadarko Petroleum of The Woodlands and BHP of Australia evacuated multiple platforms as well.

Chevron said it evacuated and shut down production at five of its platforms — the Big Foot, Blind Faith, Genesis, Petronius and Tahiti complexes. A sixth, Jack St. Melo, will remain operating normally after nonessential people were evacuated.

“At our onshore facilities, we are following our storm preparedness procedures and paying close attention to the forecast and track of the storm,” a Chevron spokeswoman said.

Shell said it evacuated nonessential personnel from seven platforms — the Appomattox, Mars, Olympus, Ursa, Auger, Enchilada and Salsa facilities.

Shell called the effort precautionary to secure its drilling operations and to remove people from danger, but most of the oil and gas production will continue. However, Shell said it has slowed down production output at its Mars and Olympus platforms for safety reasons.

“At this time, we anticipate minimal impacts to production as a result of this weather disturbance and will continue to monitor weather reports, taking further action if necessary,” Shell added.

BP said it evacuated and shut in production at its four major Gulf platforms — Thunder Horse, Atlantis, Mad Dog and Na Kika, the latter of which already was partly shut down for maintenance work.

“Once this process is complete, BP will continue to monitor offshore conditions to determine when conditions are safe to redeploy personnel and resume operations,” BP said in a statement. “We cannot yet predict when that will be. The safety of our personnel and contractors will remain BP's highest priority.”