http://gom.rigzone.com/rita.asp Most of the rigs in Rita's path experienced cat 4 winds. The majority of rigs in the GOM experienced hurricane force winds. The storm was originally headed for south of Houston where many large refineries are located. I guess traders believed this would decrease demand and crude fell significantly. However, it looks like the refineries where spared but the rigs may have had more damage than expected. I think the price of crude will rise significantly on Monday as Friday's close might have been over sold and wrong assumptions about the track of Rita were made.
most recent EIA report from today has 16 additional refineries off-line now. per fox news report on hand in Port Arthur area, several refineries are underwater or surrounded by water. CEO of Apache says they will need several days to just get their damage assessments done and then they will go from there -- this may take a few days to evaluate the situation. once the winds die down there will be the start of the process to go out and assess all the damage to the off-shore rigs --- this will take several days also. when the futures for oil open sunday we probably will still not have a clear picture yet of all possible damage.
i think crude sells off, if it doesn't gap down and sell off I expect it to close down from wherever it opens
CL Futures chart looks to me like a potential head and shoulders set-up. Prices briefly peaked around $67 mid-August, then spiked to about $70 at the beginning of September (Katrina), then peaked again around $67 early this week. Looks like $63 will be a key point of support? If oil drops sharply below that, I think that we could (finally) see a significant selloff in energy stocks.
OIl Monday, September 26, 2005 69.02 65.03 Tuesday, September 27, 2005 68.96 64.97 Wednesday, September 28, 2005 68.86 64.86 Thursday, September 29, 2005 68.71 64.72 Friday, September 30, 2005 68.52 64.53