(Radio Iowa) – Gas prices have followed the temperatures and gone up in this week. Triple-A Iowa spokesman Brian Ortner says oil prices have gone up a bit, but there’s another factor impacting gas prices.  “Really the biggest factor has to do with a B-P refinery in Indiana. They had a power outage about a week and a half or so ago, and it cut their production and they’re looking to be out of service to the end of the month. So that has a direct impact,” Ortner says. The price of regular unleaded gasoline was averaging more than three dollars a gallon across Iowa.

“When you look at prices as a whole, thankfully we’re still lower than we were last year at this time by about 17 cents,” he says. “But we have gone up since a week ago, almost eight cents since last week, which is something we haven’t seen in quite some time across the state.” He says getting that refinery back up to speed will help.

“Once that gets back online, we should see the increases slowed down a lot. I mean, we’ll still see a little bit because we’re moving into spring and people want to be driving, you know the demand is gonna go up,” Ortner says. “but that’s probably the one factor we can point to at this point if we want to say hey, this is happening and something we can say is happening has affected us around the region.”

The national average for a gallon of gas was up one cent to three-dollars, 27 cents.