With a record number of hurricanes expected to barrel through the Atlantic Ocean this year, the oil and natural gas industry is particularly at risk, according to new analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The concentration of oil refineries along the Gulf Coast makes them especially vulnerable to big storms.

“The Gulf Coast by itself has about half of America’s total refining capacity,” said Mark Finley, the fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute.

The facilities are crucial to consumers in the U.S. and beyond. “Gulf Coast refineries are also the reason why the United States is the largest exporter of refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel on the planet,” he said.

Those storms can knock out refinery capacity for months, economist Jesse Thompson of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted.

“Over that time, you know, all else being held equal, the outages would put some slight upward pressure on prices of crude oil and natural gas,” he said.

Americans could see gas prices spike, according to Karr Ingham with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers.

But “unless market fundamentals are altered by this — which is most often not the case — that should be a very short-term impact,” he said.

Eventually, affected refineries would get back to business as usual.