The flooding and flaring at the BP Whiting Refinery Monday was initially expected to only have a slight impact on gas prices.
But the outage dragged on longer than expected at the Midwest's largest refinery and now gas prices in the Great Lakes region are poised to jump to the highest point in 2025, GasBuddy Head of Petroleum Analysis Patrick De Haan said.
"The impact will be worse than the initial estimates of just a few cents," he said. "BP was down longer than expected and so expecting that prices now could be impacted by 15 to 35 cents per gallon very soon."
Industry observers initially thought the spike after storms knocked the BP Whiting Refinery offline would be felt mostly in Chicagoland metro area, including Northwest Indiana, but now it will affect most of the Upper Midwest.
"The impact of the BP refinery outage in NW Indiana now appears that it will have an impact to the majority of Great Lakes states beyond the limited Chicagoland footprint," De Haan said. "We could see the highest gas prices of 2025 very soon in the Great Lakes region."
Gas prices likely will rise in Indiana, Ilinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio due to the storms and flooding, De Haan said.
"On top of the 20 cents per gallon rise in spot gasoline prices in the Great Lakes yesterday, another 6 cents per gallon rise thus far today," De Haan said. "We have only seen prices jump in Wisconsin so far, but the additional rise adds more pressure for stations to pass increases along."
After the heavy flooding, the refinery has been reportedly struggling to pump out some of the accumulated water. It continues to recover from the storm.
"The Whiting refinery had previously deployed containment boom on Lake Michigan as a precautionary measure following the severe storms that impacted its operations," BP spokesman Cesar Rodriguez said. "Due to current wave and wind conditions on the lake, we have deployed additional boom to bolster the effectiveness of this precautionary measure in these conditions. There are no known impacts outside the refinery at this time."
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