First, this is a great report, and you should thank your correspondant. It's very helpful to get direct first-person reporting like this.

But second, I don't get a sense from this as to the percentage of the total gulf production infrastructure that is damaged. It sounds like this is a survey of the most badly hit areas. Bad as Katrina was, she painted a swath of damage across the gulf, but outside that zone things should be OK. We hear about 10s of platforms lost, but out of how many in the gulf? We hear about 15 hubs missing, but again, out of how many? 90% of the caisson wells in the storm path are damaged or destroyed, but how much of the total gulf production is that? It would be helpful to go back to this person and see if they would be in a position to estimate that.

Third, total gulf production was something like 1.5 mbpd. That's out of 75-80 mbpd worldwide. Even if we lose, say, half of the gulf production for a relatively long term, that's only about 1 percent of the world market. A relatively small reallocation of world supplies can make up for it. (And much GOM production is relatively sour crude, which is plentiful around the world.)