Energy Giant’s Flagship Plant In America’s Heartland Just Lost All Power

An electricity outage knocked ExxonMobil’s massive Joliet refinery offline Monday, threatening a major source of gasoline and diesel for the Midwest as global petroleum markets are already grappling with supply disruptions.

ExxonMobil’s Joliet, Illinois refinery suffered a “total power outage” Monday, Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, noted in a Monday X post including photographs appearing to depict flaring at the facility. An ExxonMobile spokesperson confirmed the report of the power failure and the fact that it resulted in the refinery being shut down to Hunterbrook Media, the outlet stated in an X post later in the day.

“The bottleneck is increasingly not the availability of crude oil, but the capacity to turn that crude into gasoline, diesel and other products Americans actually use,” Stuart Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group and host of the Energy News Beat podcast, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Power was restored later that evening, but the company was still assessing refinery units following the shutdown, according to Turley.

“Look to the extraordinarily high utilization of the U.S. refining fleet for the potential for more failures. Refineries nationwide are operating at nearly 98% utilization, while Midwest refiners are running above 100% of their reported operable capacity. That leaves very little slack in the system when a major facility unexpectedly goes offline,” he told the DCNF.

ExxonMobil did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

A severe storm knocked out power to the refinery in July 2024, forcing the facility into an emergency shutdown for several weeks, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The 2024 outage became severe enough that the Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency fuel waiver for Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin to address gasoline supply shortages stemming from the Joliet shutdown, according to the agency.

The ExxonMobil facility can process 275,000 barrels of crude oil per day and accounts for roughly 6% of total Midwest refining capacity, according to the facility’s 2026 profile posted to the company’s website.