than-normal winter, just when the oil industry is struggling to recover from the impact of damage inflicted by the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record. "It would take a very mild winter indeed to offset lost U.S. oil product output," said Kevin Norrish, an analyst at Barclays Capital. Exxon Mobil said Tuesday it had begun start-up of its 190,000 barrel per day refinery in Chalmette, Louisiana, leaving only three refineries, amounting to 5 percent of the nation's capacity, completely shut after damage from hurricanes this summer. At the peak, the impact of hurricanes Katrina and Rita cut a full quarter of U.S. fuel production capacity. Offshore, some 1.0 million barrels per day or 66.67 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's 1.5 million bpd of crude production stayed shut after damage from the storms, the U.S. Minerals Management Service said. Repairing all the damaged rigs, platforms and pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita will take up to a year and crude oil output will not return to normal until the end of March, U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton said last week. Refining capacity was also reduced in Europe by a strike a Shell's 418,000 barrels per day Pernis plant in Rotterdam, Europe's largest refinery. Further information on the state of fuel inventories and demand will come from U.S. government stock data on Wednesday. A Reuters survey of analysts predicted a build of 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in crude stocks last week but a 0.8 million barrel fall in distillates, including heating oil.
