Atlantic Seaboard refiners keep an eye on Earl

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Oil refiners on the Atlantic Seaboard said on Thursday they are keeping a close eye as Hurricane Earl heads up the East Coast over the next couple of days but have yet to take action affecting production.

Hurricane Earl could affect 1.1 million barrels per day of U.S. operable refinery capacity, or about 7 percent of the nation's total capacity, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Thursday.

"We're still monitoring Hurricane Earl and are taking appropriate precautions at the Paulsboro refinery, but at this time we have not made any decisions to alter operations at the plant," said Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero Energy Corp about its 195,000 bpd New Jersey refinery across the river from Philadelphia.

The EIA figures include 858,000 bpd at four refineries in the Philadelphia area, a 238,000-bpd refinery in New York Harbor and a 66,000-bpd refinery at Yorktown, Virginia.

Hurricane Earl took aim at North Carolina and is expected to move north to Virginia and then onto Canada. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said the Category 3 storm was moving up the East Coast on Friday and into Canada on Saturday.

"We are taking a number of precautionary steps," said Gary Hanson, spokesman for Western Refining which owns Yorktown, the region's southern most refinery.

Hanson said they have sandbagged a number of locations and called in extra personnel for Thursday and Friday but the plant continues to operate normally.

"Although Hurricane Earl presents a potential threat to petroleum refineries and seaports, current relatively high inventory levels for most petroleum products should lessen concerns about possible supply outages," the agency said.

Inventories of crude oil and oil products nationwide reached 114.3 million barrels, the highest level since 1990, according to most recent weekly inventory data.

(Reporting by Janet McGurty and Tom Doggett; Editing by Marguerita Choy)