Relief at the gas pump coming to Western Canada
by Ian Bickis, The Canadian Press
A major outage at BP's Whiting refinery caused prices to jump
CALGARY—A gas price analyst says Western Canada should see some relief at the pumps in the coming days after prices spiked an average of 15 cents a litre last week.
GasBuddy.com senior petroleum analyst Dan McTeague says wholesale prices in the U.S. dipped the equivalent of six cents a litre on Friday and were down another three to four cents in midday trading Monday.
McTeague said the drop in wholesale prices would likely be passed on to consumers in the coming days after some refineries resumed operations or deferred maintenance plans after a major outage at BP’s Whiting refinery caused prices to jump.
The BP refinery is a significant source of gasoline for the U.S. Midwest and Western Canada, but it lost 240,000 barrels of its production capacity of 413,000 barrels a day on Aug. 8 after a malfunction.
BP said in a statement that repair work is continuing but would not say how long it expects the work to take.
The Whiting shutdown also increased the discount on Canadian heavy crude prices because the refinery is a major processor of the product.
But Canada’s heavy crude producers received some relief after Enbridge’s 600,000 barrel a day Flanagan South pipeline started shipping Canadian crude after a minor leak caused a shutdown earlier in the week.
