ExxonMobil‘s Joliet, Illinois refinery remained offline Thursday, days after last weekend’s power outage, and the company disclosed a new complication on top of it — floodwater overwhelmed a pump at the site, prompting cleanup crews to deploy a containment boom.
Exxon also pinpointed what caused the original outage. The company pointed to an issue on ComEd’s electrical lines running into the plant as the cause, and said power to the site is fully back. Whether the flooding and pump failure trace back to that same event remains something Exxon won’t confirm.
Read: Power Outage Shuts Down ExxonMobil’s Joliet Refinery as BP Whiting Also Slows
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The industry tracker IIR Energy originally expected a full restart this week. Wood Mackenzie’s data showed the plant still not producing as of Thursday.
The delay is keeping pressure on an already-stretched fuel market. US diesel prices have been at record levels for weeks now, crossing $6 a gallon and continuing to climb, with the Iran war and Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries already squeezing supply.
The effects have crossed into Canada too — Joliet runs primarily on Canadian crude, and analysts have tied the outage to a fresh jump in Alberta gas prices, with Edmonton and Calgary both posting pump prices above $1.80 a liter this week.
