Interoceanic (IOC) on July 8 announced that its affiliate, PCI Nitrogen, halted ammonium sulfate and sulfuric acid production at its Pasadena, Texas, production facility as a precautionary measure ahead of Hurricane Beryl to ensure employee safety.
NeuAg LLC also confirmed that it closed its storage and distribution center in Freeport, Texas, on July 8 as Beryl made landfall near the city of Matagorda, Texas, as a Category 1 hurricane. The facility is adjacent to BASF’s caprolactam production plant in Freeport and consists of a 100,000-square-foot structure with 80,000 st of dry ammonium sulfate storage, a 67,500-square-foot packaging plant, and a 57,000-square-foot NPK bulk blending warehouse.
NeuAg reported on July 10 that the facility sustained “only superficial damage” and was back up and running. IOC on July 10 said the PCI Nitrogen facility remained offline, however, with no timeline for a restart. The company offered no details on possible damage or other impacts from the storm.
The PCI facility is located directly on the Houston Ship Channel and is the largest producer of synthetic granular ammonium sulfate in North America. Annual production volumes are estimated at 600,000 st of ammonium sulfate, 100,000 st of ammonium thiosulfate, and 640,000 st of sulfuric acid, according to Green Markets data.
American Plant Food Corp. (APF) did not respond to inquiries about the operational status of its facility in Greens Port, Texas, near the Houston Ship Channel. The US Coast Guard on July 9 announced that it was reopening ports and waterways following “waterway assessments and coordination with federal, state, and local partners.”
“The Captain of the Port (COTP) Houston-Galveston has set Port Condition Recovery, Tuesday, for the ports of Houston, Texas City, Galveston, and Freeport, and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway from the Colorado Locks east to High Island Bridge,” the Coast Guard reported late on July 9.
Beryl weakened to a Tropical Storm after making its third landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast, producing 80 mph winds and torrential rain in southeast Texas and creating widespread blackouts that cut electricity at one point to more than 2.5 million customers. At least seven deaths were reported as a result of the storm.
Two days after Beryl made landfall, almost 1.4 million customers of CenterPoint Energy Inc., Houston’s largest electric utility, were still without electricity while the city sweltered under a heat advisory. While CenterPoint confirmed that it had restored electricity to more than 1 million customers by Wednesday afternoon, at least 1 million homes and businesses were likely to be without power until at least Wednesday night.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Bloomberg News that he would instruct the Public Utility Commission (PCU) of Texas to conduct a study about why electricity disruptions are “repeatedly happening” in Houston.
“They should not be losing power,” he said. “I want to find out, was there a structural flaw with regard to the electrical delivery system? Was that the cause of it? If so, what needs to be done to shore it up? Or was this a personnel issue of not having enough power personnel in all the right locations to get power back up and going again?”
“I want the PUC to provide information to both me and to the Texas legislature so that we will be able to act on it next year to make sure that events like this never happen again,” Abbott added.
With no working outage map available from the city’s largest electric utility, Houston residents were forced to rely on the Whataburger app to monitor outages by identifying which of the fast-food chain’s restaurants were closed during business hours, Bloomberg reported.
The outages from Beryl are higher than those caused by Hurricane Ike in 2008. In the wake of that disaster, the Houston mayor commissioned a report on electric reliability for the region. It found that most of the outages from Ike were due to falling trees and branches across power lines and it recommended CenterPoint improve its tree-trimming practices. The study also said that the city needed to identify critical facilities such as fire and police stations and make sure they had backup generation.
Beryl’s cost in the US, counting both damages and economic losses, could reach $28-$32 billion, AccuWeather Inc. estimated.