Atlanta soaks up freer-flowing gas

Like soft rain on parched ground, gasoline has continued to pour into metro Atlanta only to be quickly absorbed.

Hundreds of service stations remained closed Monday, while drivers flocked to those still open —- and companies struggled to keep up.

QuikTrip, for instance, managed Monday to get gasoline to more than half of its Atlanta stores, said spokesman Michael Thornbrugh. “The problem is that just as soon as you get a store filled with product, it’s gone.”

The Tulsa-based chain is a major piece of the metro Atlanta puzzle, with 111 stores and more than one-fifth of the area’s gas sales.

The company’s contracts with several suppliers has meant it is as likely to have gas as anyone else —- maybe more likely. But nonstop purchases can empty a 9,000-gallon tank in just a couple of hours, Thornbrugh said.

“It is getting better, but the huge, huge demand is not slowing down.”

Because the system is just not designed to handle so many drivers filling up so often, the post-hurricane shortage very quickly became severe, said Richard Cobb, executive director of the Georgia Petroleum Council. Modest improvement is just not good enough to get things back to normal.

“We are getting healthier volumes, although we are certainly not up to where we usually are,” he said. “But even if we were at 100 percent we would have gas lines and closed stores. Once you get behind, it is hard to catch up.”

Atlanta gets all its gas from the Gulf Coast, where three refineries are still down and several others are damaged.

Two big pipelines bring gasoline into Atlanta, and both had reported lower-than-normal rates since the hurricanes.

Monday, Plantation Pipe Line, which starts in Baton Rouge, La., was still at about 80 percent of its 30 million gallon-per-day capacity, said Emily Thompson, spokeswoman for the Houston-based company. “When they give us more product, we will move it.”

Alpharetta-based Colonial Pipeline, which has capacity of 95 million gallons per day, on Monday had returned to pre-hurricane levels, according to spokesman Steve Baker.

Both pipelines run thousands of miles, serving Atlanta along the way. In 2005, metro Atlanta suffered shortages and spiking prices in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Supplies then recovered much more quickly than they have since Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

That is because those earlier storms were a month apart, giving the industry time to build up inventories, Baker said.

Moreover, this time —- especially with Ike —- the targets hit were refineries that produce the lion’s share of the region’s gasoline.

“You have to understand, Hurricane Ike hit the exact bull’s-eye of the refinery area in Texas,” Cobb said. “With Katrina and Rita, we did not have anywhere near the same number of refineries down.”

During the week ending Sept. 19, refineries were producing at 66 percent of maximum, the lowest rate on record, said Brian Milne, refined fuels editor for DTN, an energy information service.

At the same time, the nation’s supplies of gasoline sank to its lowest level since 1967, he said.