Oil and gas companies in Texas restarted some operations on Tuesday after Hurricane Beryl, with wind speeds of 80 miles (129 kilometers) per hour, hit the state, causing damage to some facilities and leaving power not fully restored.
The impact of Beryl on oil and gas production is expected to be limited. The storm made landfall near the coastal town of Matagorda on Monday. Energy companies shut down operations ahead of the storm, and Texas's largest ports and waterways were also closed.
On Tuesday, some ports reopened and most producers and facilities ramped up production. However, the speed of power restoration affected electricity supply to homes, businesses, and industrial customers.
Weather forecasting company AccuWeather preliminarily estimated that the total damage and economic loss caused by the hurricane in the United States would be between $28 billion and $32 billion.
According to the website PowerOutage.us, about 2 million users in Texas were without power on Tuesday, along with 12,000 users in Louisiana, including approximately 1.5 million users served by CenterPoint Energy.
The number of power outages in Texas is more than double the number of outages during the Houston weather event in May. In some urban communities, these outages took over a week to resolve.
CenterPoint reported that it had restored power to more than 800,000 users, and expected to restore power to 1 million users by the end of Wednesday, out of the 2.26 million affected users.
At a press conference, when asked about the timeline for full power restoration, CenterPoint's local government relations manager Paul Lock said, "I can't give a specific time, but it definitely won't be tomorrow."
