According to latest reports, the skies are clearing over Houston but the massive damage done by Hurricane Harvey is not going to be mitigated very easily. One of the most serious threats has been shutting down of oil refineries. The storm has knocked down more refineries than done by any other storm, including the biggest refinery in the United States. According to calculations by Goldman Sachs, the storm has knocked out refining capacity in the tune of 3.9 million barrels per day as of August 30th. The problem took a turn for the worse than it did earlier this week as the deluge has shifted towards Port Arthur, another refining hub. Motiva, which runs the U.S.’ largest refinery in Port Arthur, began to completely shut down its 600,000 barrels per day facility on Wednesday. In addition to Corpus Christi and Houston, which were closed earlier in the week, more ports have gone offline yesterday including Lake Charles, Beaumont, and Port Arthur.

It is now believed that it will take more time for recovery than originally anticipated as many refineries remain water logged including roads to reach them. The situation also makes key data like inventory reports, imports, gasoline build redundant as they will be impacted by the outage and will be full of noise.