Context: The administration is trying to ease the supply panic that started this weekend but reached fever pitch on Tuesday. Drivers in the Southeast have flocked to gasoline stations to hoard fuel in a reaction to the continued outage at the Colonial Pipeline. That 5,500-mile conduit supplies the East Coast with nearly half its fuel supplies and is currently offline after hackers succeeded in hitting its business computer system with a ransomware attack Friday.
Colonial could announce by the end of today whether its computer systems were sufficiently sound to begin the days-long task of restarting the pipeline.
The surge in gasoline demand in some regions has drained retail outlets of their supplies, with about three quarters of the gas stations in Pensacola, Fla., and Raleigh, N.C., and two-thirds of stations in metro Atlanta shut down amid shortages, according to a Wednesday morning tweet from Patrick De Haan, a market analyst at GasBuddy.com.
Demand across the region was enough to push overall U.S. gasoline demand on Tuesday up more than 13 percent from the previous week even as most of the country experiences only a much smaller seasonal increase in sales, De Haan wrote. There seemed to be enough supply at fuel storage terminals, he added, meaning that the bigger issue seemed to be not enough truck drivers to deliver the fuel to retail stations.
“This seems to be turning into a not-enough-truck-drivers-to-get-it-there story,” De Haan wrote.
What’s Next: The Biden administration will give a House briefing on the cyberattack at 6 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.
