Denver’s reprieve from steadily climbing gas prices is not occurring as expected, triggered in part from an outage at the seventh-largest refinery in the United States, fuel analysts reported Monday.
The shut-down of a 240,000-barrel-per-day crude distillation unit at , shot fuel prices higher in the Midwest, with some areas seeing increases of more than 50 cents in a few days, officials for said. In Indiana, prices rose nearly 59 cents during the past week to $2.96 per gallon.
Sitting on the fringe of the ripple effect, Colorado saw its gas prices increase nearly 8 cents per gallon to $2.68. In Denver, average prices gained 7.3 cents per gallon to $2.82 per gallon.
Nationally, prices increased by an average 8.5 cents to $2.68 per gallon.
“It definitely stopped the downturn (in gas prices),” said William Speer, an analyst who covers the West and Southwest regions for GasBuddy.
In July, production problems at the WRB Refining plant in Borger, Texas, one of the refineries that supply Colorado, . Once those issues were resolved, prices started to decline in Denver.
The Whiting outage could take more than one month to fix, Speer said.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean gas prices will continue to rise over a month,” he said, noting that the arrival of reserve supplies to the surrounding area should result in some relief.
The immediate production issue also likely will not change projections for cheaper gas later this year, including prices below $2 a gallon, he said.
“Everything’s still looking for $2, but it’s hard to tell that to people in Indiana,” he said.
Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace@denverpost.com or twitter.com/aliciawallace
