2024 Hurricane Season Was 'Hyperactive'

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Written by Daniel Graeber for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was officially registered as "hyperactive" by weather forecasters, with storms knocking out as much as 10% of offshore oil production.

There were 18 named storms, 11 hurricanes and five major hurricanes for this year's storm season. Four of those storms--Beryl, Debby, Helene and Milton--were responsible for most of the estimated $225 billion in damage.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) characterizes an "average" season as one with 14 named storms, seven hurricanes and three major hurricanes. Researchers at Colorado State University attributed the increased activity to warmer waters.

"Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures were at near record warm levels during the peak of the 2024 hurricane season," the NOAA wrote in a Tuesday summary of the season. "These anomalously warm waters helped fuel the hyperactive season that occurred."

Scientists at Colorado added that an El Nino weather system and West African rainfall were other seasonal attributes that contributed to an active season, with some of those developments serving as "precursor signals." Some of those signals appeared as early as eight months before the official start of the season on June 1.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the Energy Department, found the grid saw the most impact from this year's hurricane season. Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in September as a Category 4 storm in Florida, left an estimated 4 million people with power at the peak.

Severe landslides occurred in parts of the Appalachian Mountain range after parts of North Carolina received as much as 32 inches of rain from the remnants of Helene.

Rafael was a late-season hurricane that made landfall in Cuba as a Category 3 storm in November, just as the island nation was picking up the pieces from a nationwide collapse of its grid.

Though the storm avoided the U.S. mainland, it did pose a threat to oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico, with Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX) (San Ramon, California) among those curtailing production the most. The company shuttered operations at six offshore facilities that combined for about 577,000 barrels per day (BBL/d) of oil in peak design capacity.

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), an agency that monitors storm impacts on offshore energy, showed 25.7% of the oil production and 13.1% of the natural gas production from the U.S. territorial waters of the Gulf of Mexico was offline due to the storm.

EIA estimated that storms at the peak sidelined 295,000 BBL/d and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas per day in September, the peak for offshore curtailment.

Scientists at Colorado State University are expected to release their first report on the 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season in April.

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