"We are opening our marketing terminal at noon (1700 GMT) Monday but beyond that we are not commenting on the refinery," Renfroe said Monday morning.

Mississippi Power last Friday restored electrical power to the 325,000-bpd refinery, but by Monday the co-generation plant that Mississippi Power operates with ChevronTexaco was not yet up, the power company said.

Before the storm hit Alabama early Thursday, U.S. Gulf oil traders had feared that a storm surge and rains would flood the plant, as Hurricane Georges did in 1998. At that time, it took three months before the plant was back in full operation.

So Thursday Morning, when it was known that the plant had not flooded, the fear of a long-term shutdown subsided.

U.S. oil product traders on the Gulf Coast caution that the outage, although not expected to be as lengthy as it was feared, will strengthen differentials.

After all, they said, 325,000 bpd off the products market for a week adds up to about 2 million barrels of oil products, or about the same as the Colonial Pipeline flows in a day.