Energy Giant’s Flagship Plant In America’s Heartland Just Lost All Power
https://dailycaller.com/2026/09/14/exxonmobil-refinery-hit-total-power-outage-joliet-illinois/
“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.
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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.
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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.