Oak Park drivers are paying roughly 60 cents more per gallon than the national average, and the price gap traces to a cluster of refinery breakdowns less than 50 miles away.
The Chicago metro average for regular unleaded reached $4.83 per gallon on Oct. 22, according to AAA. The national average sat at $4.27. Cook County prices have consistently topped those of surrounding collar counties this fall. Illinois diesel averaged $6.56 per gallon, down from a record $6.83 on Sept. 23 but still nearly 80% higher than a year ago.
Three overlapping refinery disruptions across the Great Lakes region are behind the spike, according to RE Journals. The ExxonMobil refinery in Joliet, a 275,000-barrel-per-day plant in Will County that produces roughly 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel daily, suffered a total power outage on Sept. 13. The shutdown triggered the plant's flare system, sending flames and black smoke into the sky, according to industry publication ChemNet.
That single facility accounts for about 6% of all Midwest refining capacity. Its fuel feeds pipelines serving Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin.
ExxonMobil had not finished recovering when a new problem hit. On Oct. 20, the company shut a 50,000-barrel-per-day catalytic reformer at the same Joliet plant after Wood Mackenzie observed decreased stack activity and elevated flaring, Texas Energy Report reported. An ExxonMobil spokesperson said Oct. 21 that the company was working to resolve an operational issue but provided no restart timeline.
The Joliet outages coincided with planned maintenance at the Cenovus refinery in Lima, Ohio, which took another 185,000 barrels per day offline starting in September, according to RE Journals. The BP Whiting refinery in Indiana, the Midwest's largest, has also been running with restricted capacity. About 800 BP workers have been locked out since March 19 in a contract dispute with the United Steelworkers, In These Times reported.
What Oak Park-area residents are paying
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that gasoline prices in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin area, which includes Cook County, rose 6.3% from August to September. Year over year, the gasoline index climbed 28.9%.
The pain extends beyond the pump for suburban school districts that run their own diesel bus fleets. Naperville Unit District 203, which operates more than 120 diesel buses for roughly 16,000 students, expects to spend an extra $300,000 on fuel this school year if diesel prices hold, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 faces a different version of the same squeeze. D200 does not operate its own bus fleet. The board voted unanimously on Sept. 24 to renew its annual mass transit exemption waiver, relying on the CTA Green Line and Pace buses instead, the Chicago Tribune reported. That decision came despite a petition with more than 430 signatures from OPRF parent Vanessa Izar-McFadden calling for dedicated school bus service. Tony Arbogast, the school's assistant superintendent for business services, estimated that adding 40 to 60 buses would cost $2.6 million to $6 million per year.
High diesel prices make that already steep price tag even harder to absorb.
How long the squeeze may last
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told the Tribune that diesel prices may decline slightly in the weeks ahead as the Joliet plant resumes operations. Per-gallon diesel had already dropped more than 25 cents since the Sept. 23 peak.
Longer-term relief is uncertain. "A lot of that is a function of the continued evolution in the situation between the U.S. and Ukraine, and the U.S. and Iran," De Haan said. "If we see some improvement in tensions there, then we could see some relief."
RE Journals noted that much of the current pressure stems from a temporary regional bottleneck and that prices should stabilize as the Joliet refinery returns and BP Whiting's maintenance ends. The Oct. 20 catalytic reformer shutdown complicates that forecast. ExxonMobil has not disclosed a restart date for the unit.
