With power off, land lines down and cellular phone towers demolished, communication continued to be a major problem for oil and natural gas companies trying to assess damage onshore and offshore from Hurricane Katrina on Wednesday.

Although full assessments are not completed, U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Jolie Shifflet said that currently, five oil rigs from West Delta Platform are missing, one submersible rig is grounded at South Pass, two mobile offshore drilling units are adrift, two semi-submersibles are listing, and Royal Dutch Shell’s MARS facility is “severely damaged.”

Shifflet noted that the hurricane “caused catastrophic devastation, and the Coast Guard anticipates that there will be prolonged waterways management and environmental cleanup operations.”

Coast Guard Petty Officer Larry Chambers said, “We’re still in the preliminary stages of identifying what damage had been done. It could take a couple of days. Some of them are definitely sunk and some of them are definitely out of place.”

Meanwhile, the oil and gas shut ins in the Gulf are beginning to affect other industries as well. Sioux City, IA-based Terra Industries Inc. said Wednesday that it has ceased ammonia production at its Yazoo City, MS., nitrogen products manufacturing facility because of its natural gas supplier’s declaration of force majeure. Terra will restart Yazoo City production when natural gas supplies are restored. Terra noted that the facility is undamaged and all of its other manufacturing facilities remain in operation.

Most of the offshore industry’s base is concentrated in New Orleans, and because of flood waters and no power, information remained at a trickle. Helicopter services, many with major hubs in near-shore facilities in Plaquemines Parish, LA, had to be relocated to Texas or to inland Louisiana last weekend. Most of the services indicated that they were able to conduct some flyovers Tuesday and were continuing them on Wednesday, but an operations manager for Petroleum Helicopters Inc. said it wasn’t easy.

“We’re not having trouble getting to the sites,” the PHI spokeswoman said. “But we’re having a lot of trouble…communicating with anybody on the copters or at the sites because we have very little communications services.” She did not know the extent of the damage to PHI’s Venice, LA, heliport and other facilities, but she said the fleet had been moved to Lafayette, LA, over the weekend. “We pulled out of the east side and moved over the weekend. We are busy.”

Many of the producers that have been able to conduct flyovers of their facilities still do not have complete information as to the extent of the damage to their offshore rigs.

One indication of how the offshore rigs fared — if they were in the hurricane’s direct path — could be seen in Alabama, where a runaway oil drilling platform beached at Dauphin Island. Contract driller Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc. said that the rig had been carried more than 60 miles from its original location. Dauphin Island, a vacation and weekend retreat off the Mobile County coast, has a population of about 1,200 and was mostly deserted during the hurricane.

Diamond Offshore said no one was on board the rig when the hurricane broke it loose early Monday from a site 12 miles off the Louisiana coast and about 66 miles southwest of Dauphin Island. Aerial photographs showed the huge Ocean Warwick rig beached in shallow waters near a few beach homes on the west end of the island. The company said it was not immediately able to get people to the rig to assess the damage.

“The early indications from our aerial observations are that the damage to the majority of our offshore structures in the Gulf of Mexico has been limited,” said ExxonMobil spokeswoman Susan Reeves. “We’re obviously continuing to do assessments. Our inland Louisiana facilities are back online. Our gas processing plant [110 MMcf/d] and associated facilities at Grand Isle, LA, sustained some damage but I don’t have any details on what kind of damage or the impact. The current reports indicate no visible damage to the onshore or offshore facilities at Mobile Bay, AL, and those are natural gas facilities.”

According to early press reports, Grand Isle was completely swamped during Katrina.

Reeves said ExxonMobil has 100 structures in the Gulf of Mexico. Its Western Gulf operations were not affected. However, about 430 employees remain evacuated from Central and Eastern Gulf operations. A total of 45,000 bbl/d of the company’s oil production and 760 MMcf/d of its gas production remains shut in.

BP plc reported that inspections had so far indicated no significant damage to its massive deepwater complex. However, seven oil platforms have toppled and two platforms are leaning in the shallow waters of the Gulf.

Chevron Corp. continued to assess its facilities on Wednesday after having transportation problems a day earlier. From flyovers, it appeared that offshore platforms had not sustained major damage, but Chevron said it was taking aerial photographs and would get people to the rigs as soon as it could. It had evacuated about 3,000 employees in those areas hardest hit by Katrina, and was also working to assist any employees who had lost their homes.

Among other producers, Newfield Exploration Co. said its A production platform at Main Pass 138 “appears lost in the storm.” Noble Corp.’s semisubmersible rig Jim Thompson, which moved 17 miles in the storm, appears to show no “damage of a material nature.”

GlobalSantaFe said all five of its rigs in Katrina’s path are accounted for, although two are listing slightly and one drifted off its location and grounded in shallow waters near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Also, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. boarded staff at its Marco Polo deepwater platform, and damage assessments are being conducted.

Ensco Inc., which reported damage to its deepwater semisubmersible Ensco 7500 rig on Tuesday, said the rig has been reboarded, power restored and it is holding position. The rig initially was listing four degrees, and has now been trimmed and inspection is underway. However, initial observations of Ensco 29, one of the company’s three Gulf of Mexico platform rigs, “indicate that the rig apparently sustained significant damage,” the company said.

Because of the widespread destruction from Hurricane Ivan last September, concern was focused on the underwater pipelines that link about 4,000 platforms from the Gulf to the mainland. During Ivan, many of the pipes were damaged, buried or uprooted, and some expect to find damage from Katrina. Ivan’s damage took several months to repair.

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