As Tropical Storm Bret was downgraded from hurricane statusMonday, offshore producers in the western region of the Gulf ofMexico breathed a major sigh of relief. Their personnel andplatform facilities had completely escaped Bret’s wrath over theweekend, with producers reporting no damages and only nominalvolumes of shut-in production.

But no sooner had producers’ concerns over Bret subsided whenthey were being forced to turn their attentions to three tropicalsystems in the Atlantic Ocean – Tropical Storm Cindy; a tropicaldisturbance north of Puerto Rico; and a tropical wave located eastof the Greater Antilles. Cindy, which was downgraded from aCategory I hurricane, is moving west across the Atlantic. At thispoint, it poses no threat to landmass, but is being closelymonitored.

The combined effect of the reports of tropical systems helped topush the price for the September Nymex futures contract up 12.6cents to settle at $3.064 Monday.

As a result of Bret, an estimated 531 MMcf/d of gas productionand 5,000 barrels/day of oil production were reported shut in thewestern Gulf, said Barney Congdon, public affairs officer for theGulf for the Minerals Management Service (MMS). This is out of atotal of 13.8 Bcf/d of gas production and 1.3 MMB/d of oilproduction for the entire Gulf region. No major service disruptionswere reported on interstate pipelines as a result of the shut-ingas volumes.

Producers reported that about 50-75 platforms were shut in andabout 21-28 manned platforms were evacuated over the weekend in thewestern Gulf, which is the “second most prolific” area for offshoreproduction in the entire United States, Congdon said.

Some producers, such as Chevron Corp., began sending personnelby boats and helicopters back to their platforms yesterday, but theredeployment efforts were being hampered by the choppy waters offthe coast of Corpus Christi, TX, he noted. As a result, westernGulf platforms may not be able to return to full production untilTuesday or Wednesday, Congdon said.

Chevron yesterday redeployed personnel to all of the platformsthat it had evacuated on Saturday, and was beginning to “ramp upproduction again,” said spokesman Jeff Moore. He noted the companywould return to full production “as soon as possible.” He wasunable to estimate the volumes that were shut in.

Chevron, Moore said, evacuated 300 personnel from an unspecifiednumber of platforms in the Garden Banks, East Cameron, WestCameron, Vermilion, South Marsh Island and Eugene Island fields inthe western Gulf. The producer made the decision to send itspersonnel back after Bret was downgraded to a tropical storm.

Initial reports indicated there was no damage to any ofChevron’s facilities, according to Moore. “The hurricane didn’tdirectly pass through the area in which we operate,” but it came”pretty close,” he said.

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