UPDATE 1-Colonial delays gasoline pipeline restart to next week after leak
(Adds EPA waiver and comments from spokesman, source)
NEW YORK, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Colonial Pipeline, the country's largest refined products system, said on Thursday that it delayed the full restart of its main gasoline line to next week after last week's 6,000-barrel leak in Alabama.
The company shut its main gasoline and distillate line on Friday after the leak in Shelby County, Alabama. It has since restarted parts of the affected line and has begun pumping gasoline on its distillate line as a contingency plan.
Traders are bracing for a severe shortage in supply if a full restart of the gasoline line is delayed, particularly as the outage comes around refinery maintenance season.
Colonial had previously estimated a full restart of Line 1 by this weekend, but work was delayed on Wednesday evening and into Thursday morning due to gasoline vapors at the site, the company said.
"It's unsafe to work when gas vapors are present, and the weather can make vapors either be present or dissipate," Colonial spokesman Steve Baker said in an email.
Shippers have begun securing vessels to move fuel from the refiner-rich Gulf Coast to the demand-heavy East Coast, according to a source at a Colonial shipper.
It could take more than three or four weeks for the supply issues surrounding the outage to be resolved, the source added.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency waived certain requirements for summer-grade gasoline in the Atlanta and Nashville areas on Wednesday.
The agency said the waiver is in response to a disruption in the supply of low volatility fuel caused by an unanticipated pipeline failure in Alabama.
Colonial's Line 1, with a capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day, runs to Greensboro, North Carolina from Houston.
U.S. gasoline futures jumped as much as 6 percent to a session high of $1.4433 a gallon on the news. (Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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