The BP Whiting Refinery in northern Indiana shut down the largest of three crude distillation units Saturday for what the company calls “unscheduled fix work”.
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The newspaper said that the unit is responsible for more than half of the refinery’s daily capacity, which is listed at 413,000 barrels per day.
“We are expecting sub-two dollar prices this fall by October, but this refinery issue will raise prices”, DeHaan said. How temporary, that is somewhat in the air.
An issue with BP’s largest Midwest oil refinery in Whiting, Ind., is causing gas prices to spike this week in West Michigan.
The average price for a gallon of gas in the Grand Rapids metro area is about $2.64 as of Wednesday morning, according to GasBuddy’s crowd-sourced website. Indiana’s state average price is $2.64 per gallon, though Gary, near the Whiting refinery, reports $2.87 per gallon. The refinery is the largest in the Midwest and accounts for about 11% of all fuel production in the region.
The gasoline products operate on “just in time” basis, thus when one of the biggest gas suppliers gets hit by a sudden accident, the supplies in the region are expected to drop.
By late Friday afternoon, the average in Milwaukee as calculated by GasBuddy.com was $3.18 a gallon.
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Gasoline prices in Ohio and other Great Lakes states could spike by 30 cents a gallon in the next several days. In the Chicago wholesale market, regular gasoline on Wednesday jumped to 75 cents above the U.S. RBOB gasoline futures benchmark, the second-highest level in the past decade, according to Reuters data. With reduced operations at the BP refinery, these stations will have to source their fuel from locations that are farther away, driving the cost of gas higher.
