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An oil refinery is shown near Houston following Hurricane Harvey, Aug. 29, 2017.Win McNamee/Getty Images

Canadian pump prices are expected to ease back to pre-Hurricane Harvey levels in the coming weeks, as U.S. Gulf Coast refineries slowly resume operations and restore supply to the North American market.

As Hurricane Irma headed toward Florida and two other storms roiled in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, analysts saw little threat to the petroleum supply chain that was severely disrupted when Harvey slammed into Texas's massive refining centre.

"We have seen both wholesale and retail prices come off the spike and I expect that trend is going to continue for a while," said Michael Ervin, vice-president at the Kent Group Ltd., which tracks petroleum markets.

In its daily survey, Kent reported that Canadian pump prices averaged $1.24 a litre on Friday, down from a weekday peak of $1.27 on Wednesday. The company did not conduct surveys on the Labour Day weekend, when prices climbed well above $1.30 in many Ontario markets. The national average on Friday was still 13 cents above prices that existed prior to the hurricane-fueled increase.

Tom Kloza, head of Oil Price Information Service in Maryland, said he expects prices to decline to pre-hurricane levels by the start of fall on Sept. 22.

He said Harvey hit just as North American gasoline consumption was peaking heading into the Labour Day weekend, with August representing a record month for demand in the United States.

However, consumption typically falls off as summer ends, so there will be less pressure on the market. As well, a number of refineries that were planning to shut down for maintenance remain in operation in order to take advantage of the fat profit margins that refiners are earning from the temporary disruption.

While gasoline and diesel demand in Florida spiked as residents prepared for the onslaught of Irma, a Category 4 hurricane, the end result will be a reduction in demand as businesses close and people hunker down, either at home or at evacuation spots, to riding out the storm, Mr. Kloza said.

Gasoline and diesel markets across the United States and Canada were hit by the loss of supply when a quarter of the American refining capacity went offline during the storm. Many of those facilities have either restarted or have begun that process, which takes several days to complete. However, some companies are still assessing the damage at their refineries, especially those around Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana border, which experienced heavy flooding when Harvey came ashore.

At one point, 3.7 million barrels per day of refining – or roughly a quarter of U.S. capacity – was offline, Dylan White, an analyst at Genscape Inc., said. That's now down to 3 million barrels per day of capacity out of action, a figure that will drop rapidly now that many companies are in startup mode.

At the same time, markets in the U.S. Northeast were deprived of supply when the Colonial Pipeline – which carries gasoline from the Gulf Coast – was shut down. As a result, wholesalers and retailers across eastern North America faced a supply shortage that forced prices higher.

Mr. Ervin noted that spikes were greatest in Central and Eastern Canada, while the Prairies saw roughly half the increase that cities in Ontario and Quebec experienced. Vancouver – which already has the highest gas prices in Canada – saw virtually no impact from the hurricane.

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