Gasoline shortages are starting to become a problem in the Southern US in areas such as Nashville and Atlanta. This week's "This Week in Petroleum" (TWIP) (included in its entirety under the fold) did indeed show a big drop in gasoline inventory as we expected, but we are still digesting the impact, keeping in mind that these are averaged numbers over four weeks--which of course begs the question of whether or not the full impact of the refinery outages we have seen are in these numbers or not.

In this post, I have prepared a few graphs to supplement this week's TWIP. We know that Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike had a huge impact on refineries, and that these production shortfalls are now slowly making their way through pipelines. It is my view that because Texas refineries have been fairly slow to get back online, and because of the built-in lag due to the slow travel of refined products through pipelines, the present gasoline shortages are likely to get worse in the next two to three weeks.