ExxonMobil shut its 275,000 barrel-per-day Joliet refinery in Illinois on Sunday, September 13, after a power failure triggered the facility's safety flare. Refinery status data from Bloomberg list the plant as an unplanned incident, with a crude unit capacity of 251,800 barrels per day.

Exxon traced the outage to the primary and secondary ComEd power lines that supply the refinery. A later filing disclosed that floodwater had overwhelmed a pump at the plant. The company said electricity was fully restored by Thursday, though restoring power does not mean fuel production has resumed.

Located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, the Joliet refinery can produce about 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day, mainly for Midwest consumers. Its processing capacity represents roughly 6% of Midwest refining capacity and about 1.5% of total U.S. capacity.

A prolonged shutdown would tighten regional fuel supply and raise the risk of further price increases across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, reported that Great Lakes spot diesel had become the most expensive in the country at about $240 a barrel.

The outage arrived with diesel already at record levels. AAA data showed the national average retail diesel price at $6.45 a gallon at the time of the shutdown. Goldman Sachs commodity analysts have warned that tight global diesel markets could also squeeze gasoline supply as refiners shift output toward higher-margin diesel.

For trucking fleets, Midwest refinery disruptions typically show up first in regional diesel prices, which EIA data later showed rising 43 cents in a single week in the Midwest region.

Source: ZeroHedge - https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/midwest-braces-diesel-crisis-after-exxons-joliet-refinery-suffers-disruption