Colonial Pipeline’s Line 1 Resumes Shipments following Outage
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced Colonial Pipeline’s Line 1 resumed shipping gasoline, after a recent outage that began Oct. 31 halted movement across the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Line 1 carries 1.4 million barrels of gasoline each day from the U.S. Gulf Coast to a product storage hub in Greensboro, North Carolina. This line also provides gasoline to both central and eastern Tennessee, southern Georgia, and eastern and western areas of Virginia.
The EIA said it does not anticipate any problems with Line 1 and expected shipments to reach as far as Baltimore, Maryland by Tuesday. The agency expected the northern terminus in Linden, New Jersey, near New York Harbor, to receive shipments as early as Wednesday.
Despite the recent outage, the major retail gasoline market did not suffer any major impact. GasBuddy, a crowd-sourced gasoline price comparison website, shows that gasoline costs in most areas along the Colonial Pipeline remain virtually unchanged from last week. Costs in most southeastern states remain under $2.35 a gallon. The Petroleum Administration for Defense District (PADD) shows that gasoline storage in the Lower Atlantic states remains relatively high, around 27.5 million barrels, nearly 20 percent over the previous five-year average.
A previous disruption in early September resulted in record changes in stored motor gasoline. Both the lower Atlantic states and the Gulf Coast states suffered a decrease of close to 6 million barrels on Sept. 16. That disruption on Line 1, which lasted from Sept. 9 through Sept. 21, was addressed quickly with the replenishment of 4.8 million barrels before the Sept. 23 report.
