Hurricane Ike...

...will miss many oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico but appears on a direct track to nail a large swath of oil refinieries.

This Knoxville News Sentinel story is an early indicator of the potential effects of Ike:

Refinery outages along the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Gustav have created severe shortages, causing retailers like Weigel's to scramble to keep their pumps flowing. And Hurricane Ike is bearing down on Texas, drawing a bead on North America's petroleum manufacturing capital of Houston and portending a worst-case scenario for dealers and consumers.

"Knoxville has been out of gas since Monday. We've been buying gas from Atlanta, North Carolina, Kentucky, anywhere we can get it," said Bill Weigel, head of the Weigel's chain of convenience stores in Knox, Blount, Sevier, Loudon, Anderson and Monroe counties.

Same story in places here in Montgomery. I stopped this morning at a station that was out of gas. Troubling.