NEW YORK - Crude-oil prices rose Wednesday as traders braced for the possibility that Hurricane Rita could smash into key oil facilities in Texas.
Workers fled oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and oil companies began closing Texas refineries, threatening the supply of gasoline to the nation's pumps, less than a month after Hurricane Katrina tore through the same region.
Rita strengthened into a Category 5 hurricane late Wednesday with sustained winds of 175 mph, the National Hurricane Center said, and is likely to hit the Texas coast, home to one-fourth of the nation's oil-refining capacity.
''Prices are going to be driven directly by the projected path of the storm,'' said John Kilduff, analyst at Fimat USA.
Experts say the refineries, nestled in a 300-mile swath from the Louisiana border to Corpus Christi, would recover within a couple days from a glancing blow. But if Rita swamps Houston as Katrina did to a three-state area along the Gulf of Mexico last month, they warn, the storm will take more dollars from motorists' wallets and add to the problems of the nation's airlines.
''Some of those refineries in Texas, they're at sea level. It's a table top, it floods very easily,'' said Ed Silliere, vice president of risk management at Energy Merchant LLC in New York.
Light, sweet crude for November delivery rose 60 cents to settle at $66.80 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after surging as high as $68.27 earlier Wednesday. Heating oil jumped nearly 3 cents to $2.0387 a gallon, while gasoline surged more than 7 cents to $2.0531 a gallon.
BP PLC began closing its massive Texas City refinery on Wednesday. Marathon Oil Corp. and Shell Oil did the same at their refineries near Houston.
The damage from Katrina and the precautionary evacuations due to Rita have slashed normal Gulf oil production of 1.5 million barrels a day by 73 percent, the U.S. Minerals Management Service said Wednesday.
Since Katrina evacuations began Aug. 26, the storms have cut more than 27 million barrels of oil production, or 5 percent of the Gulf's annual production, the agency said. Natural gas production was 47 percent below normal on Wednesday.
Oil refining in Texas accounts for a quarter of the nation's total output of petroleum products, including gasoline and distillate fuels. According to the Energy Department, 18 of Texas' 26 refineries are located near the Gulf of Mexico, with a combined distillation capacity of 4 million barrels per day.
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