Wisconsin gas prices are climbing after an outage at the Midwest's largest oil refinery in northwest Indiana.  A BP owned refinery in Whiting, Indiana caught on fire the evening of October 16, with no injuries reported.  The fire burned until Wednesday morning and the refinery has not been in operation since. 

Amid the outage, the average price of a regular gallon of gas in Wisconsin rose to $2.71 on Tuesday, up more than eight cents from the day before. Prices for mid-grade and premium fuel also jumped by eight cents or more on Tuesday.  Following the outage, the wholesale price of gas shot up by about 25 to 30 cents a gallon, forcing stations to pay about $2,000 more per truckload of gas, sending the cost directly to the consumer.

Located about 17 miles from downtown Chicago, the Whiting refinery is BP's largest in the world. It processes about 440,000 barrels of crude oil daily.   BP and other companies have an incredible financial incentive to re-open the facility as when they are not producing, they are not making money. 

The question now is when will prices normalize?  You can expect stations to keep raising prices over the next 48 hours, and those high prices may linger for a few days, before they start to stabilize by the weekend.