1st Gulf oil rigs may be online Wednesday
Oil companies surveying oil facilities by air; won't know when they can resume production until closer inspection.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil companies continued inspecting their offshore rigs and platforms by air Tuesday but wouldn't say when production can come back online until they get a closer look at their pipelines.
Devon Energy Corporation, one of the oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico, said it might be able to resume production in the hurricane-stricken area by Wednesday.
"We think there's a possibility that we could get production running as early as tomorrow," said Devon spokesman Chip Minty on Tuesday. "But that really depends on the status of the pipelines we work with."
Devon (DVN, Fortune 500) maintains 25 manned production platforms and three drilling rigs in the Gulf. Devon, like other oil companies including BP (BP), Anadarko Petroleum Corp., (APC, Fortune 500) Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA), ConocoPhillips (COP, Fortune 500), Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) and Chevron Corp., (CVX, Fortune 500) evacuated its platforms ahead of Hurricane Gustav and shut in 100% of oil production in the area.
Gustav made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday as a Category 3 hurricane. Since that time, Gustav has headed north, away from the Gulf, and been downgraded to a tropical storm.
The oil companies have been inspecting the facilities from the air and none of them have reported significant damage. Also, the American Petroleum Institute said that, based on data from transponders, none of the rigs have drifted from their original locations in the storm.
Minty said that Devon conducted reconnaissance fly-overs and did not detect any significant damage from the air. But he added that the underwater pipelines cannot be visually inspected from the air, and the company won't know if they're serviceable until on-site inspection.
Anadarko said, in an emailed press release, that it completed a fly-over inspection of Gulf Coast oil facilities and that it plans to begin on-site inspections Tuesday.
"We expect to begin returning personnel to these facilities today for a more thorough inspection," Anadarko said on Tuesday, though the company did not estimate when production would resume.
BP spokesman Daren Beaudo said his company is conducting aerial surveillance of platforms today, and hopes to land inspectors at the facilities on Wednesday to determine whether pipelines were still functional. He would not estimate when the facilities would go back online, and said that safety and environmental inspections had to be completed first.
Mickey Driver, spokesman for Chevron, said, "It will be a couple of days before we have completed our inspection and determined whether we can bring things back on line."
Driver said the company's helicopter fleet, which is necessary for aerial inspections, had been moved to Mississippi to ride out the storm. Also, he said many of the employees were New Orleans residents who had been evacuated, and the company is still trying to contact them and find out if they're safe.
"Employees have been scattered all over the place, and a lot of government officials have been saying they don't want people coming back to New Orleans today," said Driver. 
