Colonial Pipeline explosion halts decline in gas prices

ALBANY — The explosion Monday that killed one worker and injured five others while leading to the shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline is expected to halt the slide in gas prices at the pump for Georgia motorists.

Whether the closing of Line 1 of the pipeline, a major gas supply artery for the Southeast and Northeast, will drastically affect pump prices depends on how long the supply line stays out of commission.

“Line 1, the major line carrying auto fuel, will remain down for the remainder of the week,” Garrett Townsend, the Georgia public affairs director for AAA Auto Club Group, said Tuesday afternoon. He said a mid-afternoon update on the situation showed that Line 2 had resumed operations Monday night and that Line 1 could resume operations by noon Saturday.

“If Line 1 is successfully restarted by the weekend, drivers should experience limited impact the pump,” he said. “The good news is that Line 2 has restarted. But that’s not the one that carries fuel for automobiles. The larger Line 1 is. The longer that one is down, the more impact that will have on motorists.”

The explosion occurred in Shelby County, Ala., a few miles from the site of a leak that resulted in a shutdown in September that disrupted gas delivery for 12 days. That interruption in supply resulted in gas prices jumping 28 cents per gallon in Georgia, according to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report survey.

If Line 1 resumes operations this weekend, Townsend said, Georgia may avoid another spike that sharp. He noted that the September outage of the Colonial Pipeline didn’t start affecting Georgia’s average retail gas prices until the sixth day of the interruption.

“Potentially, it could be a few days before we see any impact,” he said.

In Albany Tuesday afternoon, there was no indication of an immediate effect. By late afternoon, prices were still below $2 a gallon at some stations. GasBuddy, another organization that surveys retail gas prices, reported mid-afternoon that the average price in Albany had risen about 1.7 cents from its Monday benchmark to $2.084.

The local gas stations that are most likely to feel any pinch will be the small independent operations.

“Unbranded retailers generally bear the brunt of limited supplies,” Townsend said. “When there’s a tight supply, they generally feel it the most.”

Reuters news service reported Tuesday that gas futures initially jumped 15 percent to their highest level since June, but that dropped to a 4.6 percent increase following news that the line was expected to be back in service Saturday.

The company was also exploring the possibility of shipping auto fuel on parts of Line 1 and possibly on Line 2, which is normally used for diesel and jet fuel distribution, as it did in the September outage, Reuters said.

AAA noted that Colonial’s Line 1 has a capacity of 1.3 million barrels per day of gasoline, and Line 2 has a 1 million barrels per day capacity for distillates shipping.