A handful of refineries sustained heavy damage from Hurricane Rita's fierce winds, but initial reports from the Gulf Coast early Saturday suggested that the nation's largest refining center was spared the destruction that many had feared.
Although the early news was good, oil industry experts cautioned that refinery crews from Lake Charles, La., to Houston are still assessing the condition of the plants in Rita's path as it hit land in the predawn hours.
The refineries with confirmed damage could be shut down for as long as a month for repairs -- a situation that would crimp fuel supplies and could trigger price hikes at the nation's gas pumps.
"It's really too soon to tell, but it looks like we have better news than we feared," said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group.
"But we still have a lot of operations shut down, a lot that need to get restarted, and we're already in a tight supply situation," Felmy said.
Power outages hit in cities across central and eastern Texas and in western Louisiana, adding to the woes at some refineries, pipelines and other oil facilities, as well as cutting off electricity for more than a million customers.
Houston, home to the largest cluster of refineries, appears to have avoided the worst of the storm.
Department of Energy spokesman Craig Stevens said officials are "cautiously optimistic" that refineries there will be back to full production relatively quickly.
As the day wore on, concern in the oil business focused on the gasoline-making plants in Lake Charles and in the Texas cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur.
Seven refineries based in those areas process a combined 1.7 million barrels per day of crude oil -- equal to about 10% of the nation's total daily processing capacity.
The nation's largest refiner, Valero Energy, owns seven refineries along the Gulf Coast regions hit by hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
Valero reported Saturday that Rita's winds did "significant damage" to cooling towers and a flare stack at its plant in Port Arthur, and that it could take two weeks to a month to make the repairs and restart that refinery.
Shell Oil said that the Port Arthur refinery owned by its Motiva joint venture did not appear to have flood damage, but that "the refinery has sustained wind damage, including downed power lines and cooling water-tower damage," according to a statement from the company Saturday.
