Prolonged BP Whiting Refinery outage expected to cause highest gas prices of 2025 in Great Lakes region

The flooding and flaring at the BP Whiting Refinery Monday was initially expected to only have a slight impact on gas prices.

But the outage dragged on longer than expected at the Midwest's largest refinery and now gas prices in the Great Lakes region are poised to jump to the highest point in 2025, GasBuddy Head of Petroleum Analysis Patrick De Haan said.

"The impact will be worse than the initial estimates of just a few cents," he said. "BP was down longer than expected and so expecting that prices now could be impacted by 15 to 35 cents per gallon very soon."

Industry observers initially thought the spike after storms knocked the BP Whiting Refinery offline would be felt mostly in Chicagoland metro area, including Northwest Indiana, but now it will affect most of the Upper Midwest.