Don’t blame Suncor USA’s refinery power outage for rising Colorado gasoline prices, a Suncor official said Monday.
A Sunday-morning outage at the Commerce City oil refinery partially disrupted production Sunday and Monday at Colorado’s single largest source of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
The refinery was expected to resume normal operations by late Monday night or early today.
Yet the production disruption shouldn’t have an impact on fuel prices, which have been rising for the past 2 1/2 weeks, said Steve Douglas, general manager of supply and marketing for Suncor.
“People might wrongly put two and two together and get five,” Douglas said. “Retail prices were already rising before this outage.”
Colorado’s average price for a gallon of self-service unleaded regular has risen from $2.09 on Feb. 1 to $2.21 Monday, according to AAA. During the same period, the national average has increased from $2.16 to $2.26.
The $2.09 average in Colorado was the lowest price since March 2005. Prices hit a record high of $3.08 last August.
Analysts said the recent price rise is a reflection of higher crude-oil costs.
Oil prices fell to a 20-month low of $49.90 a barrel Jan. 18 after mild weather cut demand in the Northeast, where heating oil is a primary source of home and business heating.
But since then, cold weather in much of the U.S. has driven crude prices back up. Oil earlier this month hit $60, and was $58.49 Monday in after-hours electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Increases in crude-oil prices typically are followed by higher prices at gasoline pumps.
The Suncor facility in Commerce City is Colorado’s only oil refinery. It supplies about 35 percent of the state’s gasoline and more than 50 percent of diesel fuel sold in Colorado. The refinery also produces jet fuel, asphalt and other petroleum products.
The remainder of Colorado’s gasoline and diesel is delivered via pipeline from refineries in Texas, Kansas and Wyoming.
Douglas said Suncor’s fuel reserves at the refinery were sufficient to make up for the estimated production loss of 50,000 barrels of gasoline and 30,000 barrels of diesel and jet fuel.
He said Suncor will likely purchase more fuel from out-of- state refineries to replenish its emergency supplies.
“If this (disruption) would have happened in a high-demand period like July, it would be a crisis,” he said. “But fortunately, this happened during a period of slower demand.”
While the power outage lasted only a few moments, it required Suncor to shut down much of its refining equipment and check it for potential damage before restarting.
Douglas said the cause of the outage wasn’t known. He said Suncor officials will be talking to Xcel Energy to determine if the problem originated within the refinery or outside the facility.
Staff writer Steve Raabe can be reached at 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com.
