The largest pipeline company in the US, has been cyber attacked, and has been forced to shut down to contain the damage. So we loose the two point five million barrels a day transport ability, they have been supplying.
There is a hidden danger here, when the pipeline stops pumping; the tank farms, begin to fill up. Since refineries use crude reflow to cool the process, when the tank farms fill up; the refinery itself must be turned off, which will take a day. Restoring the process takes several days, if everything works perfectly.
When I worked pipeline, we worked until it was running again; to avoid a forced shutdown. The computer controls I added, were not as invasive as modern controls. They also were not as accessible, and with dedicated hard wired lines; weren't subject to external sources of attacks.
Within about 5 days (depending on fill levels in the tank farms), the refineries will be forced to shut down. This will force a significant expansion of the service interruption, and raising gas prices overnight.
It sounds to me like China is trying some international cyber bullying. It only remains for the puppet biden to blame Russia, for a proper boogie-man.
So fill your gastanks, before the gas station
pumps draw on empty storage tanks! It will take time to restore control to these systems, if they did their sabotage correctly!
I would have reset the run pressures to more pressure than the pipe can survive, erased site specific safety data, reset the modens to their lowest vaud rate, erased all memories, and password protected the changes with a random character password.
I'm sure that the actual work was worse than that!
They were smart to stop all of it, before it exploded! As it is, every pump station must be repaired, and they don't have enough repair parts for the entire pipeline system. A pipeline is like the old Christmas lights, they ALL must run for oil to flow!
They will strip the crude collection pipelines to repair the product lines, but this only kicks the can down the road. This is betting that they have enough crude in tanks already to run their refineries, while they fix the crude gathering side....
It is likely that all the pump stations (boosters) will need to be stripped of controls to be returned to the manufacturers for a total refurbishment! Then the manufacturer's JIT (just in time) production method, thanks to government taxes on inventory; will limit the repairs to what they can get from their vendors in china! Since china is likely the source of this cyber attack, parts will be SLOW in coming....
Next, their employee biden will release the strategic reserve, to mitigate a problem caused by his employer; by crippling our military forces!
How the dominoes fall....
Bottom line, better fill up the gas cans too!