Exxon has begun to restart some units at its refinery in Joliet, Illinois, after a three-week outage.

The 251,800-bpd facility was shut down in the middle of July following a power outage caused by a storm. The refinery produces about 9 million gallons daily of gasoline and diesel.

“Situations like this take time to recover as they will have to see if the sudden shutdown did damage to any of the units,” an unnamed source close to the company told Reuters at the time.

It later emerged that the power outage had affected 16 units at the refinery, including a vacuum distillation unit and a catalytic cracker unit.

The outage at the Joliet refinery deepened the discount of heavy crude from Canada to West Texas Intermediate  because the facility is a major consumer, but the news about its restart tightened the price difference in anticipation of a pickup in demand. As of the time of writing, the discount had narrowed from about $15 per barrel to some $13 per barrel.

Exxon earlier this month beat Wall Street estimates with the second-highest earnings for the second quarter in a decade as the acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources fueled a record quarterly production and the highest oil production since the Exxon and Mobil merger.

The company reported last week that its second-quarter 2024 earnings came in at $9.2 billion, or $2.14 per share assuming dilution.

That was higher than the analyst estimate of $2.02 compiled by The Wall Street Journal.

The $60-billion Pioneer acquisition, which Exxon completed during the second quarter, contributed $500 million to earnings in the first two months post-closing with record production, and integration and synergy benefits are exceeding expectations, Exxon said.

The transaction handed Exxon access to over 1.4 million net acres in the Delaware and Midland basins in the Permian.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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