Colonial says gas is reaching NC again, but GasBuddy predicts 7-14 days of ‘headaches’
Gov. Roy Cooper and other North Carolina officials urged patience Thursday as gasoline began to again reach the state via the Colonial Pipeline, a major source of fuel for the state that was shut down after being hacked last week.
That shutdown led to fuel shortages throughout North Carolina, which Cooper said Wednesday were “pretty much solely related to panic buying.”
In a Thursday release, Cooper said it will take several days for the gasoline situation to return to normal. Gasoline supply is available in and around North Carolina, Cooper said, but tankers need time to take fuel to individual stations.
“Do not fill up your gas tank if you don’t need it,” Attorney General Josh Stein said Thursday during a CNN appearance.
As of Thursday morning, more than 70% of stations in North Carolina were out of gasoline, according to GasBuddy.com, an app and website that aggregate consumer and station reports on the availability and price of fuel. GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan tweeted that he sees “about 7-14 days of headaches” for North Carolina drivers who need fuel.
“The situation will definitely take time and slowly improve due to a high number of outages and higher number of stations to refuel,” De Haan wrote.
Colonial began the process of restarting its pipeline about 5 p.m. Wednesday, five days after a cyberattack forced the company to shut it down. The ensuing days without pipeline shipments to the state, coupled with panic buying, resulted in many stations running dry.
Colonial said Thursday morning that gasoline was reaching its tank farms in Greensboro and Selma and would be flowing through a branch to Raleigh-Durham International Airport by the end of the day.
“Colonial Pipeline has made substantial progress in safely restarting our pipeline system and can report that product delivery has commenced in a majority of the markets we service,” the company said in a statement at 9 a.m. “By mid-day today, we project that each market we service will be receiving product from our system. “
In a written statement to The News & Observer on Thursday, Adam Sheetz, the gas station chain’s executive vice president of operations, said some of the company’s stores are seeing limited fuel outages.
“These shortages are not due to supply issues but are a result of extremely high demand causing stores to run out of fuel before the next scheduled delivery,” Sheetz wrote.
The pipeline resuming operations should calm the situation and limit panic buying, Sheetz added.
People who find gas are paying a bit more for it. The average price of a gallon of regular in the Raleigh area on Thursday morning was $2.89, according to AAA, up 3 cents a gallon overnight and 18 cents more than a week ago. Average prices in Durham and Chapel Hill were a couple pennies higher.
Stein said his office has received 622 price gouging complaints for high gas prices this week.
Price gouging applies, Stein said, when a station raises the price on the fuel it already has in hand because it notices that demand is rising. But if the station has to pay more to refill its supply, it can raise its prices.
Stein pinned blame for the situation on the “cyber criminals” who hacked the Colonial Pipeline, but also said that panic buying has worsened the state’s shortages.
“Once it triggers, it then takes off like wildfire, and I think we’ve had a lot of panic buying in North Carolina, and I just hope folks know to just calm down,” Stein said, likening the situation to the run on toilet paper that happened at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the federal level, most members of North Carolina’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday signed onto letters concerning the incident.
A letter from six of the state’s eight Republican representatives called for a full briefing on the incident, including recommendations about which other segments of the nation’s energy infrastructure are vulnerable to cyberattacks.
The state’s five Democratic representatives penned a letter to House leadership calling for an investigation into the Colonial Pipeline hack and requesting that cybersecurity standards for the nation’s energy sector to be considered as part of an infrastructure package.
This week was not the first time that the Colonial Pipeline’s supply to North Carolina was impaired. On Oct. 31, 2016, construction equipment struck the pipeline in Alabama, causing an explosion. The News & Observer reported at the time that then-Governor Pat McCrory said the pipeline provides about 70% of the state’s fuel.
Earlier in 2016, a leak near Helena, Alabama, caused the pipeline to stop for 12 days, causing higher prices and fuel shortages at North Carolina pumps, according to The N&O.
Last August, the pipeline had a large leak near Huntersville that has resulted in three notices of violation from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. The pipeline spilled more than 1.2 million gallons of gasoline, according to a press release from DEQ in April, with the company recovering 944,000 gallons of gasoline and 1.15 million gallons of water that had come into contact with gasoline.
This story was originally published May 13, 2021 at 9:43 AM with the headline "Colonial says gas is reaching NC again, but GasBuddy predicts 7-14 days of ‘headaches’."
