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.

The refinery produces roughly 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel every day, equivalent to approximately 550,000 car and semi-truck fill-ups, per the profile. The facility also produces liquefied petroleum gas, asphalt, sulfur and petroleum coke.

Located roughly 40 miles southwest of Chicago in suburban Will County, the refinery primarily processes Canadian crude delivered by pipeline and sends its finished petroleum products to consumers throughout the Midwest, according to ExxonMobil.

The refinery’s 2024 shutdown demonstrated how an electricity failure at Joliet can ripple through regional fuel markets. Midwest gasoline inventories fell by two million barrels during the week immediately following that shutdown, dropping below both 2023 levels and the five-year low, according to EIA.

The reported Monday outage comes as global petroleum markets are already facing significant supply pressure. Saudi Arabia’s critical East-West Pipeline was shut down following drone attacks, threatening a route capable of moving roughly four million barrels of oil per day as disruptions continue to constrain Middle Eastern supplies.

It was not immediately clear what caused Monday’s power outage, whether the electricity failure originated inside the ExxonMobil facility or on the surrounding power system, or whether backup power allowed portions of the refinery to remain operational.

The outage also comes roughly a month after Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker demanded information from ExxonMobil and other oil companies about operations at the Joliet refinery amid soaring fuel prices.

Pritzker asked ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods to provide the state with the refinery’s throughput, product mix and operational decisions affecting the volume of gasoline and diesel available to consumers since the Iran war began, according to an August press release from the governor’s office.

“At a moment when Illinois working families continue to feel the burden of higher costs, these oil companies face a clear choice — help ease the burden for families or exploit the conflict to generate windfall profits,” Pritzker said in early August. “Illinoisans have a right to know how these companies are profiting from this conflict, how much of those outsized profits Illinois families are being made to pay, and what steps they will now take to provide hardworking Illinoisans some relief at the pump.”

The Joliet refinery has also recently faced federal environmental enforcement. The EPA resolved a Clean Water Act enforcement action against the facility this summer, with a final consent agreement and order entered June 29, according to agency records.

ExxonMobil also recently paid a $136,200 civil penalty to resolve alleged Clean Water Act violations at the Joliet refinery. The EPA alleged the company discharged industrial wastewater in violation of the facility’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit and Section 301 of the Clean Water Act, according to an EPA public notice.

The payment resolved ExxonMobil’s liability for federal civil penalties stemming from the alleged violation, per the notice.