Refinery Outage Delays Next Oil Price Rally

The power outage that took BP’s refinery in Whiting, Indiana, offline for at least three weeks has delayed a potential price jump by dampening demand expectations in the immediate term. The 400,000-bpd facility is the largest refinery in the Midwest—and its temporary shutdown will lead to an increase in crude inventories, traders expect—and they are acting accordingly. Reuters’ John Kemp reported that in the week that followed the February 1 outage at Whiting, traders sold some 62 million barrels of West Texas…