HURRICANE IMPACTS ON ENERGY SECTOR
Hurricanes cause widespread inundation and strong winds that damage critical infrastructure, for example, energy infrastructure, including offshore oil and gas platforms, coastal oil refineries, liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, pipeline networks, electrical substations and transmission lines near the coast, energy ports and shipping terminals etc., which can disrupt energy availability and economic activity.
Future projections indicate that hurricanes are likely to become more intense (Knutson et al., 2020). The Gulf of Mexico/America (Gulf thereafter) is a major energy hub for the United States, with a high concentration of offshore oil platforms, refineries, and electricity infrastructure.
Damage to this infrastructure can therefore trigger cascading impacts on national energy supply and the broader economy. While many resilience strategies have been proposed, this study focuses on evaluating how coastal wetlands, poorly represented in the current E3SM, can serve as natural infrastructure to help improve resilience of energy infrastructure to natural disasters and therefore mitigate economic consequences.
Modeling on the impact on energy sectors (Posadas, ORNL, PNNL, Wu)
We will develop a refinery-focused damage-to-economic impact module that translates hurricane-induced flooding, saltwater intrusion, and wind into infrastructure disruption and economic losses.
Infrastructure damage will be estimated using hazard-specific fragility relationships and converted into functional disruptions, including capacity loss and outage duration (Ouyang, 2014).
Direct economic impacts will be quantified using a production-loss framework based on reduced refinery throughput and disruption duration, reflecting the sensitivity of energy systems to supply disruptions and price shocks (Rose et al., 2007; Kilian, 2008).
By improving the accuracy of flooding and damage assessments that account for coastal wetlands, this
framework can reduce unnecessary anticipatory refinery shutdowns and the associated economic losses (Chen et al. 2025).
We will further evaluate energy system resilience under disruptions implementing risk- based technoeconomic analysis.
Overall, this integrated modeling framework will enable us to quantify how coastal wetlands reduce refinery damage and mitigate economic losses under hurricane scenarios, and allow us to identify potential tipping points in wetland extent that provide coastal protection.
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