Tag Archives: Texas

Poorer Texans already had trouble paying energy bills – then came the storm

By Brad Brooks

(Reuters) – Cleopatra Mancha had already lost her job in the pandemic. Then the winter storm came to her home state of Texas.

“We had all the pipes bust in our house. It wasn’t just one area – it was everywhere. In the bathrooms, our sinks, where our washer and dryer are,” she said. “So we’re not having to just try to pay just our electric bill – we have to pay for all these repairs, too.”

The 44-year-old mother of two in Arlington, Texas, choked back sobs.

Energy insecurity among poor and middle-class Americans had already deepened because of the economic crisis the pandemic created, according to experts. Even before the pandemic, low-income households in Texas were spending 10% of their income on energy – compared with 2% for the better off.

Energy-burdened poorer Texans have been forced to buy less food to keep the lights on one month, or put off purchasing clothes another month to keep the heat going.

In Texas last week, 4 million people were without power for days and half saw water services disrupted. Across the United States, experts say, households will suffer unless energy policies are reworked, grid infrastructure improved and deep investments made to fix the 30 million housing units that have serious physical or health hazards, over one-fifth of the nation’s total.

Dana Harmon is the executive director of the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute, which has been tracking increasingly unaffordable electric bills in lower-income communities and in neighborhoods of color. The pandemic has forced people out of work and at home for increasingly long periods – including children learning at a distance. That has increased demand for household energy consumption.

“Now when you put a storm on top of that,” Harmon said, “you see people facing real danger.”

There has been much attention cast on energy bills exceeding $10,000 for some Texas customers subject to variable energy market prices. Harmon said those customers only make up about 0.2% of all consumers in the competitive electricity market. She is more concerned about the 3.5 million low-income households across Texas that have already been paying a disproportionate chunk of their income for energy and likely face higher bills as fuel costs have risen for utility companies.

Harmon said a saving grace from the widespread blackouts might be that leaders in Austin who are making decisions on planning for energy systems, along with industry leaders in Houston and elsewhere, “keenly experienced what it’s like to go without energy during a crisis, and I hope we would see more empathy for what energy insecurity feels like.”

Other advocacy groups like the Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio say landlords are finding loopholes to evict tenants behind on rent and a wider moratorium on evictions is needed.

Michelle Romero – national director for Dream Corps, an environmental, technology and social justice group – said that the grid in Texas and across the United States needs to be modernized to increase energy security.

Romero also said federal programs meant to help low-income households by offering funds for weatherization or bill relief badly need more funding and to be reworked so they cover more people.

A study released by Dream Corps on Wednesday found 30 million homes across the United States have serious physical or health hazards, from asbestos to structural damages, making it impossible for many to properly heat or cool their homes. The damage can also disqualify the homes from obtaining federal aid in the first place.

Romero said that just as the pandemic has allowed a wider public to see the intersections between race and health care disparities, she thinks the events like the Texas freeze are driving home the realities about who bears the brunt of extreme weather events.

“Who is impacted first and worst by events like we saw in Texas is absolutely an issue of income inequality and racial injustice,” she said.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Donna Bryson and Lisa Shumaker)

Derailed BNSF fuel train fire in Texas nearly extinguished

(Reuters) – A BNSF Railway Company train carrying products including coal and gasoline to Houston in Texas was still burning on Wednesday, a day after it collided with a truck near Cameron, causing an explosion in gasoline-carrying carriages.

BNSF, owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc and one of the largest railroad operators in North America, had said on Tuesday that 13 of the train’s 110 carriages were derailed, with five of those carrying gasoline.

Five other carriages carrying non-hazardous loads were also on fire, the company added, forcing an evacuation of the surrounding area.

“Local first responders and BNSF personnel are still on site, working to completely extinguish the flames,” BNSF, one of the largest railroad operators in North America, said in a statement.

The train crew and truck driver were not injured, BNSF said, adding it would assess the damage and plan a clean-up once the fire was fully doused.

The fire is expected to be extinguished on Wednesday, the Cameron fire department said.

“It’s not completely out, we’re still putting water on it,” said fire department chief Henry Horelica.

The accident is the second incident since 10 BNSF Railway carriages carrying crude oil derailed, with three catching fire, in Custer, Washington, in late December.

The Texas-based company did not respond to a request for further comment and it was not immediately clear what companies would be affected by the delay in shipments.

BNSF is one of the largest U.S. coal carriers.

The region is already contending with an unprecedented power crisis caused by brutal cold weather and any fuel delays could further pressure the state’s electricity grid operator, which uses natural gas, coal and other fuels to power generators.

(Reporting by Asha Sistla and Swati Verma in Bengaluru; Editing by David Goodman)

Several board members of Texas’s electric grid operator to resign: filing

(Reuters) – Top directors of Texas’s electric grid operator, who faced sharp criticism from the massive failure of the state power system last week that left millions without heat or light, resigned en masse on Tuesday.

The board’s chairman, vice chairman and two other directors of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) resigned effective on Wednesday, according to a notice to the state Public Utility Commission.

Craig Ivey, who was nominated Feb. 16 to fill a board vacancy, also withdrew before he could be seated, according to the notification.

“To allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions, we are resigning,” wrote Chairman Sally Talberg, Vice Chairman Peter Cramton and directors Terry Bulger and Raymond Hepper in a joint resignation.

“Our hearts go out to all Texans who had to go without electricity, heat and water during frigid temperatures and continue to face the tragic consequences of this emergency,” they added.

(Reporting By David Gaffen; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Aurora Ellis)

Oil producers eye long road to recovery as Texas begins to thaw

By Devika Krishna Kumar and Laila Kearney

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Shale oil producers in the southern United States could take at least two weeks to restart the more than 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude output that shut down because of cold weather, as frozen pipes and power supply interruptions slow their recovery, sources said.

The winter storm that gripped Texas and much of the country over the past week forced the biggest ever weather-related shutdown in the Permian Basin, cutting 2 to 4 million bpd from nationwide oil output and hitting the roughly 5 million barrels produced each day from top shale producing state Texas especially hard.

The shut in oil production represents 2 to 4% of global supply, so a slow recovery would tighten worldwide crude markets and may bolster prices that already hit a one-year peak earlier this week.

There may be glitches in supply as utilities assess and repair damage, industry sources said.

“I think it will be a while before things get better out in the field,” one executive at a Permian producer said, on condition of anonymity.

Typically, oil production can be restarted quickly after cold weather, but the scale of the shutdown is unique, said Jodi Quinnell, research director at energy researcher and consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

“Within the Permian, it’s definitely different this time around, partially because of the sheer amount of production taken offline,” Quinnell said.

Permian Basin oil production is down 35%, dipping below 3 million barrels a day in output for the first time since 2018, according to Wood Mackenzie data.

Problems in accessing the fields and equipment could slow the recovery, executives at oil companies said.

Some companies that truck equipment and workers into Texas shale basins to repair frozen wells and gathering lines have been unable to access certain roads due to icy conditions, a worker at one Texas trucking company said.

Several midstream companies, including Oryx Midstream, a Permian-based gathering and logistics company, as well as TC Energy’s Marketlink pipeline, have declared force majeure as power disruptions impede their ability to receive and pump barrels.

“This situation is a little different, where if you have continued power issues, you can’t run pump stations and compressors and things like that,” said Ryan Smith, East Daley Capital’s research director.

Producers are also grappling with a lot of actual freeze-offs, truck issues and mechanical problems at tank farms, one source at a merchant that works with Permian oil producers said.

“It’s not like power comes back on and you flip the basin back on it,” the source said, predicting production could be at about 50% on Monday but take a few weeks to be at 100%.

The production decline from wellhead freeze-offs is expected to total 16 to 18 million barrels in February, J.P. Morgan analysts estimated.

Still, producers are unlikely to make major investments to prevent problems like this recurring, analysts and company officials said. Many consider the freeze-off a once-in-a-century event.

“It’s a cross benefit analysis. They’re thinking, how often does this happen, are we going to deal with this once a decade? It’s not really worth it for them to guard against an outlier event,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital in New York.

(Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar and Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Rosalba O’Brien)

About a third of Texans still facing disrupted water supplies

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) – Some 8.8 million people in Texas, about a third of the state’s population, still had issues with their water supply as of early Monday, authorities told Reuters, after a record-breaking freeze knocked out power stations last week.

Millions of Texans are still being advised to boil water before using, though all power plants were back online over the weekend and power had been restored to most homes as the weather returned to normal.

Officials in Houston, the biggest city in the state, said water there was safe to use without boiling as of Sunday.

“As of 7 AM Central Time Monday, more than 1,200 public water systems have reported disruptions in service due to the weather, many of them leading to Boil Water Notices. This is affecting more than 8.8 million people, in 199 Texas counties,” a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) spokesman said in an emailed statement.

“A total of 147 PWSs serving a population of just under 120,000 people are non-operational. In addition, 8 PWSs wastewater treatment facilities have reported as non-operational,” the spokesman added.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said late on Sunday that he had joined the Texas Air Guard, the Texas National Guard and the U.S. military to distribute water.

“About 3.5 million bottles of water have been delivered,” the governor said in a tweet.

A deadly winter storm caused widespread blackouts last week across Texas, a state unaccustomed to extreme cold, killing at least two dozen people and knocking out power to more than 4 million people at its peak.

Texas is also bringing in plumbers from out of state to help repair burst pipes, the governor said on Sunday. Homeowners or renters who do not have insurance may be able to seek reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he said.

U.S. President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Texas on Saturday that makes federal funding available to people harmed by the storm, including assistance for temporary housing and home repairs and low-cost loans.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Oil extends losses as Texas prepares to ramp up output after freeze

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil prices fell for a second day on Friday, retreating further from recent highs as Texas energy companies began preparations to restart oil and gas fields shuttered by freezing weather and power outages.

Brent crude futures were down 66 cents, or 1%, at $63.27 a barrel by 12:27 p.m. (1727 GMT). U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude fell 99 cents, or 1.6%, to $59.53.

For the week, Brent was on track for a 1.3% gain while WTI was largely flat.

This week, both benchmarks had climbed to the highest in more than a year.

“Price pullback thus far appears corrective and is slight within the context of this month’s major upside price acceleration,” said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates.

Unusually cold weather in Texas and the Plains states curtailed up to 4 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude production and 21 billion cubic feet of natural gas, analysts estimated.

Texas refiners halted about a fifth of the nation’s oil processing amid power outages and severe cold.

Companies were expected to prepare for production restarts on Friday as electric power and water services slowly resume, sources said.

“While much of the selling relates to a gradual resumption of power in the Gulf coast region ahead of a significant temperature warmup, the magnitude of this week’s loss of supply may require further discounting given much uncertainty regarding the extent and possible duration of lost output,” Ritterbusch said.

Oil prices fell despite a surprise drop in U.S. crude stockpiles last week, before the big freeze hit. Inventories fell 7.3 million barrels to 461.8 million barrels, their lowest since March, the Energy Information Administration reported on Thursday.

“Vaccines and the impressive rollouts we’ve seen have delivered strong gains, as have the efforts of OPEC+ – Saudi Arabia, in particular – and the big freeze in Texas, which gave oil prices one final kick this week,” Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA said.

“With so many bullish factors now priced in, it seems we’re seeing some of these positions being unwound.”

The United States on Thursday said it was ready to talk to Iran about returning to a 2015 agreement that aimed to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Still, analysts did not expect near-term reversal of sanctions on Iran that were imposed by the previous U.S. administration.

“This breakthrough increases the probability that we may see Iran returning to the oil market soon, although there is much to be discussed and a new deal will not be a carbon-copy of the 2015 nuclear deal,” said StoneX analyst Kevin Solomon.

(Additional reporting by Ahmad Ghaddar in London and Roslan Khasawneh in Singapore and Sonali Paul in Melbourne; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio)

‘Fragile’ Texas energy grid comes back to life, steep challenges remain

By Brad Brooks

LUBBOCK, Texas (Reuters) – A “fragile” energy grid has fully returned to life for frigid Texans who have spent five days dealing with blackouts caused by a historic winter storm, but challenges in finding drinking water and dealing with downed power lines loomed on Friday.

All power plants in the state were once again functioning, but about 280,000 homes were still without power early Friday while 13 million people – nearly half of all Texans – have seen water services disrupted.

Ice that downed power lines during the week and other issues have linesman scrambling to hook all homes back up to power, while the state’s powerful oil and gas sector has looked for ways to renew production.

Hospitals in some hard-hit areas ran out of water and transferred patients elsewhere, while millions of people were ordered to boil water to make it safe for drinking. Water-treatment plants were knocked offline this week, potentially allowing harmful bacteria to proliferate.

Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, said she was pleased with progress in the past 24 hours, but warned residents to brace for more hardship.

“The grid is still fragile,” she said, noting that cold weather would remain in the area for a few days, which would “put pressure on these power plants that have just come back on.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott confirmed that all power-generating plants in the state were online as of Thursday afternoon. He urged lawmakers to pass legislation to ensure the energy grid was prepared for cold weather in the future.

“What happened this week to our fellow Texans is absolutely unacceptable and can never be replicated again,” Abbott told an afternoon news conference.

The governor lashed out at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a cooperative responsible for 90% of the state’s electricity, which he said had told officials before the storm that the grid was prepared for the cold weather.

The lack of power has cut off water supplies for millions, further strained hospitals’ ability to treat patients amid a pandemic, and isolated vulnerable communities, with frozen roads still impassable in parts of the state.

Nearly two dozen deaths have been attributed to the cold snap. Officials say they suspect many more people have died, but their bodies have not yet been discovered.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

Power restored to most in Texas after ‘tragic few days’

By Adrees Latif

GALVESTON, Texas (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of homes in Texas are coping without heat for a fourth day on Thursday after utilities made some progress restoring power, as the state’s leaders came under mounting criticism for their response to the winter storm.

The crisis facing the country’s second-largest state looked set to continue, with millions of people still without access to water, many struggling to find food, and freezing temperatures expected to last through Saturday.

Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, said the number of homes without power in her county had fallen to 33,000 from 1.4 million a few nights ago.

“It’s definitely a big positive that the power is back on for most of the residents,” Hidalgo said in an interview. “It’s been a miserable few days, a really tragic few days.”

Hidalgo warned that a “hard freeze” Thursday night could cause setbacks and encouraged donations to food banks with some residents struggling to secure food and water. She noted reports of senior centers and other vulnerable communities lacking basic supplies.

At present some 447,000 Texas households were without power, down from around 2.7 million on Wednesday, according to poweroutage.com, a website that tracks outages.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a cooperative responsible for 90% of the state’s electricity, said on Thursday it made “significant progress” in restoring power. It did not provide detailed figures.

Angry residents have trained much of their ire on ERCOT, which critics say did not heed warnings after a cold-weather meltdown in 2011 to ensure that Texas’ energy infrastructure, which relies primarily on natural gas, was winterized.

Critics have also raised questions about the leadership of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has called for an investigation of ERCOT. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz too came under fire for flying to the Mexican resort city of Cancun with his family, despite the storm’s fallout. The Republican lawmaker cut his trip short after his travels were reported, saying he would return to Texas and “get to the bottom of what happened” in his state.

Gary Southern, a 68-year-old real estate broker from Mineral Wells, Texas, said his power was restored on Wednesday afternoon, enabling him to have his first solid night of sleep since he lost electricity in the early hours of Monday.

“It was one of the worst things we’ve ever had to go through,” the lifelong Texan said, adding that he was frustrated at being told there would be rolling blackouts, only to go days without power at all. “I know a lot of people in our community still don’t have it (power) and are frustrated.”

The lack of power has cut off water supplies for millions, further strained hospitals’ ability to treat patients amid a pandemic, and isolated vulnerable communities with frozen roads still impassable in parts of the state.

As of Thursday morning, 154 of the 254 counties in Texas have reported disruptions in water service, affecting 13.2 million people, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Many of those affected have been told they need to boil their water.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said historically low temperatures were hindering efforts to inoculate people against COVID-19, with more than 2,000 vaccine sites in areas with power outages. In addition to aiding Texas, FEMA said on Thursday it would provide assistance to the neighboring state of Oklahoma due to the weather’s impact on its power grid.

Nearly two dozen deaths have been attributed to the cold snap. Officials say they suspect many more people have died – but their bodies have not been discovered yet.

In Galveston on the Gulf Coast of Texas, a pop-up shelter with heat but no running water had allowed about three dozen people to huddle overnight before they were ushered back out into the cold on Thursday morning to let cleaning crews get it ready to do it all over again on Thursday night.

“When you go to the bathroom, grab a bucket of water to clear the toilet – we’re going old school!” Cesar Garcia, director of Galveston’s Parks and Recreation Department, called out as he oversaw scrubbing of the shelter set up in the McGuire-Dent Recreation Center.

Garcia said he was bracing for a potentially bigger crowd tonight, perhaps closer to the 100 who sought shelter on Monday night, sleeping on bleachers or a gymnasium floor with blankets and whatever they brought with them from home.

“Tonight being the coldest night, we don’t know what to expect,” Garcia said.

While the icy conditions should gradually improve, record low temperatures will likely persist in the South Central region of the United States through Saturday, according to the National Weather Service said, which said the storm was moving northeastward, dropping snow on a swath of states in its path.

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey; Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Jonathan Oatis)

‘I just ask God to help me’: Texas funeral home crushed by death as U.S. COVID toll nears 500,000

By Callaghan O’Hare and Maria Caspani

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Sunday is traditionally a quiet day for Chuck Pryor’s Houston funeral home, but on this Sunday in February, almost a year after the global pandemic reached Texas, the phone was still ringing.

Pryor took the call: COVID-19 had taken yet another American life — pushing the nation’s death toll closer to the half-million mark — and another grieving family required the services of the exhausted funeral director and his staff.

“It’s just mentally taxing,” Pryor, 59, who runs a small funeral home business with his wife Almika, told Reuters earlier this month.

The sheer number of coronavirus deaths has overwhelmed many U.S. funeral homes. Some family-owned businesses have handled a crushing case load, with some seeing the same number of deaths in a couple of months as they would normally handle in a full year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesperson with the National Funeral Directors Association.

“Most funeral home directors know that it’s a 24-hour, 365-day career, but you’re just not used to every single day working those hours,” Nie told Reuters.

The pandemic has brought profound changes to the way Pryor must operate. Overloaded hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly. It has been difficult to find trained staff, caskets and protective equipment. And every day brings a multitude of phone calls from families in pain and distress.

As the virus showed no sign of releasing its grip and deaths mounted over the summer and in the fall, exhausted workers at Pryority Funeral Experience fell ill while others quit.

“People quit because they mentally can’t handle it,” he said. “I pray God, — just give me strength… I want to run away right now, to be honest …I’m concerned about myself breaking down so I just ask God to help me.”

Sometimes the stories he hears on the job haunt him.

Like the one he was told when he answered a COVID-19 call on a recent weekend in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston.

A young woman in her 30s had just died from complications from the virus, a while after doctors performed a C-section to save the life of her twins as her condition deteriorated.

The following day, Pryor was having a hard time processing the tragedy, one of the hundreds of thousands that have marked a year of profound loss across the entire country, and the world.

“I slept with it last night and I hate that, you know, when you take them to bed,” he said.

NEVER SO BUSY

Pryor said he had never been as busy as during the pandemic. The deaths the funeral home handled in 2020 were more than double those he would see in a normal year.

January was a terrible month. Even as hospitalizations in Texas fell by 10% last month from a 36% rise in December, coronavirus deaths increased by 48%, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

“I do pace myself and I do turn people down because I can only do so much,” Pryor said.

His staff of four full-time employees and eight part-timers is feeling the strain, he said.

Embalmers and others who come directly into contact with bodies and are at higher risk of contagion, have been hard to find, Pryor said. And caskets are in short supply due to the pandemic. On a Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight of them.

The job is so consuming, Pryor said, there is little time left to perform the most essential personal tasks, like cooking or spending time with his soon-to-be 10-year-old son.

While caring for those who lost loved ones in his community, Pryor’s family was faced with their own grief. The virus took his nephew and his uncle while his wife lost her cousin and her aunt to COVID-19.

‘HOOKED’ ON HELPING PEOPLE

Pryor grew up in rural Texas, the youngest of six and the only one of his siblings who did not attend segregated schools. His first brush with the funeral business was in the late 1970’s when he would help illiterate members of his community with their mail and bills at the local funeral home on the first of every month.

“I got hooked in helping people when they need help the most,” Pryor said.

Since he started his own business in 1984, celebrating life even in death had always been front and center in his profession, he said. But the coronavirus pandemic turned everything “upside down,” making it even more difficult to help people through the grieving process.

In late January, Pryor and his team handled the funeral arrangements for Gregory Blanks, a 50-year-old COVID-19 victim who ran a heating and air conditioning business in the Houston area. He was a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

In keeping with current restrictions to prevent infections, only a limited number of family and friends were able to attend the burial at San Felipe Community Cemetery where a preacher spoke next to a table lined with baseball caps for the Cowboys and other Texas teams.

Clad in a face mask sporting the logo of her husband’s company, Blanks’ wife Lila solemnly watched as some of Pryor’s workers lowered the casket into the ground.

“People, they can’t hug,” Pryor said. “They cry and no one’s there to wipe your tears.”

(Reporting by Maria Caspani in New York and Callaghan O’Hare in Houston, additional reporting by Anurag Maan in Bengaluru; Writing by Maria Caspani; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Texas energy freeze stretches to sixth day, raises Mexico’s ire

By Jennifer Hiller

HOUSTON (Reuters) – Texas’s freeze entered a sixth day on Thursday, as the largest energy-producing state in the United States grappled with massive refining outages and oil and gas shut-ins that rippled beyond its borders into neighboring Mexico.

The cold snap, which has killed at least 21 people and knocked out power to more than 4 million people in Texas, is not expected to let up until this weekend. The deep freeze has shut in about one-fifth of the nation’s refining capacity and closed oil and natural gas production across the state.

The outages in Texas also affected power generation in Mexico, with exports of natural gas via pipeline dropping off by about 75% over the last week, according to preliminary Refinitiv Eikon data.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s natural gas providers not to ship outside Texas and asked state regulators to enforce that ban, prompting reviews.

The state’s electrical grid operator, ERCOT, was trying to restore power as thermal generators – those powered by natural gas, coal and other fuels – lost the capability to provide power as valves and pipes froze.

It is unclear whether Abbott or regulators will be able to enforce a ban on interstate or cross-border shipments. Abbott’s request to the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, set up a game of political football, according to a person familiar with the matter, between groups that do not have the authority to interfere with interstate commerce.

Texas exports gas via pipeline to Mexico and via ships carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from terminals in Freeport and Corpus Christi. It also supplies numerous regions of the country, including the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.

The ban prompted a response from officials in Mexico, as U.S. gas pipeline exports to Mexico fell to 4.3 billion cubic feet per day on Wednesday, down from an average over the past 30 days of 5.7 billion, according to data from Refinitiv.

The Mexican government called the top U.S. representative in Mexico on Wednesday to press for natural gas supplies as power cuts there have hit millions of residents.

While the storm is moving out of Texas, freezing temperatures remain and refining operations in particular might take days, if not weeks, to resume.

“The oil and gas industry is finally getting some power into these fields. The Delaware Basin is getting back online and gas is starting to move out of it,” Christi Craddick, Texas railroad commissioner, said on Wednesday night during an emergency meeting.

Nonetheless, U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were near their highest since Jan. 8, 2020. Natural gas futures hovered near a three-month peak. Next-day prices at Waha hub in the Permian basin in West Texas eased from all-time peak of $209.75 per mmBtu.

BIG OPERATIONS IN TEXAS

Texas is the nation’s biggest fossil fuel energy producer, but its operators, unlike those in North Dakota or Alaska, are not used to frigid temperatures.

The state accounts for roughly one-quarter of U.S. natural gas production. As of Feb. 10, Texas was producing about 7.9 billion cubic feet per day, but that fell to around 2 billion on Wednesday, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.

Overall U.S. natural gas output also slumped to the lowest level since January 2017. One billion cubic feet of gas can supply about 5 million U.S. homes per day.

About 4 million barrels of daily refining capacity has been shuttered and at least 1 million barrels per day of oil production is also out.

The Houston Ship Channel, a key export waterway, was shuttered again on Wednesday evening, but that was because refineries were not loading enough vessels and not due to the weather, a Houston Pilots dispatcher said.

“We have two departures at 09:30 (local time) this morning and two inbound vessels who are waiting for the water levels to come up,” the dispatcher said.

Next-day power for Thursday at the ERCOT North hub, which includes the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, were mired near a record high of $8,800 per MWh hit in the last session. Prices were below $50 per MWh before the cold blast.

(Reporting by Jennifer Hiller and Gary McWilliams in Houston; additional reporting by Marianna Parraga and Diego Ore in Mexico City and Scott DiSavino in New York; editing by Richard Pullin and Jonathan Oatis)