"Demand for oil from China is slowing down. In Japan and Europe, the developed economies are slowing down also. All of these factors will be bearing down on oil prices in the coming weeks and months," Gheit said.
Pump prices continued to slide. The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline dipped by half a cent nationally to $3.68, the Energy Department reported Tuesday. California motorists got a bigger break, with prices dropping a nickel to an average of $3.905, according to the government's weekly Monday survey of filling stations, released a day late because of the Labor Day holiday.
A day after Gustav's Gulf Coast rampage, the region's offshore oil production -- all 1.3 million barrels a day of it -- remained shut down. As the storm approached over the weekend, companies evacuated workers from 632 of the gulf's 717 stationary oil-production platforms, according to the U.S. Minerals Management Service.
In addition, more than 95% of the region's natural gas production of 7.4 billion cubic feet a day remained off line Tuesday. Workers from most offshore natural gas facilities were evacuated, as were employees from 110 drilling rigs in the gulf.
Onshore, 14 Gulf Coast refineries were still not operating and output was reduced at 10 other facilities, the government said. The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, a major facility for oil imports, was still down.
Citgo, which runs a refinery in Lake Charles, La., asked the U.S. Energy Department for 250,000 barrels of oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the request was granted late Tuesday. So far, that is the only such request, Energy Department spokeswoman Alyson Austin said.
As was the case after Katrina, power outages emerged as the biggest obstacle to bringing refineries and pipelines back into operation.
Damage to power lines and other equipment at Entergy Corp., a major Louisiana utility, left five of the 12 major refineries in its territory without service, according to Platts, an industry news publisher. Among those without power: two large refineries operated by Motiva, along with Alon USA Energy Inc. and Placid Refining facilities near Baton Rouge, Platts said.
Entergy officials on Tuesday called the utility's damage "massive" -- creating the company's second-largest outage after Katrina -- and during a news conference wouldn't estimate when power might be fully restored.
