Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

Damages to oil and gas structures in the Gulf of Mexico from recent hurricanes:


Platforms destroyed:
Katrina: 46
Rita: 63


Platforms damaged:
Katrina: 20
Rita: 30




Rigs destroyed:
Katrina: 4
Rita: 1




Rigs adrift:
Katrina: 6
Rita: 13




Rigs damaged:
Katrina: 9
Rita: 10




Rigs unaccounted for:
Katrina: 0
Rita: 3


Total:
Katrina: 85
Rita: 120



Source: Minerals Management Service

WASHINGTON - Hurricane Rita inflicted substantially more damage to offshore oil and gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico than Katrina, the Interior Department said Tuesday.

Making matters worse, damage to onshore support facilities could hobble Gulf production for months.

"We've never seen the kind of devastation to our Gulf oil and gas production that we've witnessed this year," Interior Secretary Gale Norton said.

Some 2,900 of the Gulf's 4,000 oil and gas production platforms were in the paths of the two hurricanes.

Rita destroyed 63 platforms — including capsizing Chevron's deep-water Typhoon facility — as well as one jackup drilling rig.

Katrina took out 46 platforms and four drilling rigs.

Aside from Typhoon, the destroyed platforms were mostly older, "end of life" facilities that produced only about 1.5 percent of the oil and a mere 0.7 percent of the natural gas in the Gulf.

"We anticipate that most of these will never be rebuilt," Norton said of the older platforms.

The two hurricanes also tore 19 drilling rigs from their moorings and set them adrift, in some cases causing serious damage. That was also a problem seen last year during Hurricane Ivan.

Regulators aren't quite sure why those moorings are not holding. Officials plan to hold a conference in Washington on Nov. 17 to examine that problem more fully.

Interior and Coast Guard inspectors now are trying to figure out if a wayward drilling rig collided with the four-year-old Typhoon platform and caused it to flip over.

'We don't know'
"When you look at all the platforms that were in the path of both hurricanes and their size and the damage they sustained, not one of them was capsized," noted Johnnie Burton, director of the U.S. Minerals Management Service. "This was a fairly sizable platform, and there is no reason to think that the wind was strong enough to capsize it.

"So we are looking at it. We are investigating. We don't know. Maybe it was the wind. But common sense tells us that something else may have happened."

Rammed by Max Smith?
Chevron officials say the Typhoon lost its own moorings and moved off its production site. An industry publication reported that Noble Corporation's Max Smith drilling rig was blown off location and rammed Typhoon.

Noble officials, in a prepared statement issued last week, called that report erroneous, saying the Max Smith passed about 2.5 miles to the south of Typhoon's "fixed" position.

Chevron officials are conducting their own probe.
"We don't know what happened to it," Chevron spokesman Mickey Driver said.

While offshore crews are busily trying to make repairs, production is recovering much more slowly after Rita than it had after Ivan and even Katrina.

Slow recovery
As of Tuesday afternoon, nearly 90 percent of the typically daily oil output and 72 percent of the natural gas production remained shut in, the MMS reported.

In part, that's because so many offshore workers were forced to evacuate and many were left homeless.

Shore bases that typically supply offshore facilities were ravaged by the storms. Pipelines must be carefully inspected to ensure they weren't damaged by the dragging anchors of wandering rigs.

And many of the onshore oil terminals and gas processing plants that otherwise would receive production from the Gulf were damaged.

Indeed, 21 gas processing plants are still out of commission, the Energy Department reported Tuesday. While many lack electricity or gas supplies, 11 of those facilities sustained damage from the storms.

Onshore damage
In fact, as much as 30 percent of the offshore production may be shut in because of damage to onshore facilities.

And many will remain shuttered for "several months," Norton said. Regulators were heartened that no wellheads appear to have leaked, although there were onshore oil spills, particularly from a ruptured tank at a Murphy Oil refinery that sent oil into a neighborhood, Norton said.

Officials believe this year's two hurricanes caused less damage to undersea pipelines than Ivan, which ripped up pipelines during a huge mudslide at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

david.ivanovich@chron.com