Heavy Weather  

India's record monsoon rains last week provided another example of weather induced oil supply disruptions, with the country expected to lose one seventh of its oil production for the next year (The Oil Drum also has some comments on this).

The heaviest rains ever recorded in India have shut down the country's financial and entertainment capital, Mumbai. Landslides and flooding triggered by three days of monsoonal rain have left at least 418 dead in the city and surrounding state of Maharashtra.

Parts of the city - which has a population of more than 15 million - received 944 millimetres of rain on Tuesday night alone. Sydney's average annual rainfall is 1216.5 millimetres. "Never before in Bombay's [Mumbai's] history has this happened," the police commissioner, A.N. Roy said. Tens of thousands of people were stranded in Mumbai on Tuesday night, with many forced to sleep in their waterlogged cars or on the floor of the airport terminal. All India Radio reported that about 150,000 people were stranded in railway stations.

Television footage showed mobs of people fighting for food parcels dropped from helicopters by navy rescue teams. There was also footage of two dead men sprawled in the streets of a Mumbai neighbourhood while people scrambled for food packages nearby. In the confusion, a fire on a gas well just off the Mumbai coast, also rain-affected, engulfed an oil rig. Ten people died and 367 were rescued. Officials said yesterday that it might take a year to rebuild the platform, which produced a seventh of the country's oil.

The cause of the problems on the rig still seem to be a bit unclear.

The death toll from a massive fire on an drilling platform in India's biggest sea oil field has risen to 10, with many people missing. Some survivors had to jump into the Arabian to escape the flames. Others took to lifeboats. "We have picked up people from the sea and there were people who were in the water for more than 12 hours," said Madanjit Singh, vice-admiral of the Western Naval Command.

The fire on the platform, 160km off Mumbai, has since been brought under control. A supply vessel and an oil rig in the region also were destroyed, Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar told reporters. "After the fire broke out there was panic on the platform and some employees ... jumped into the sea," a coast guard official said. The cause of the fire has not been determined. Unconfirmed media reports said it started after a cargo vessel struck the oil platform. "Our first priority is to save lives and second, to control environmental pollution," Aiyar said. He said the loss of crude oil production was expected to be "considerable."

One supplier that won't be upping exports to India in the meantime is Iran, with production reported to be falling by over 300,000 barrels per day this year (a much larger drop than the 65,000 barrel decline that The Oil Drum quotes in their table in the earlier link).