The new year has arrived and Southland motorists are already grappling with a familiar nemesis — rising gas prices.

The average price for a gallon of regular in Los Angeles County was $3.07 Monday, up 27 cents from a month ago and up nearly 40 cents from the same time last year.

The Inland Empire isn’t faring any better.

The average price in San Bernardino County was $3.01. That was nearly 30 cents more than a month ago and up 38 cents from a year earlier.

By contrast, the average U.S. price for regular was $1.99 a gallon Monday, down 5.3 cents from a month ago and down 20 cents from a year ago.

Patrick DeHaan, a senior petroleum analyst with GasBuddy.com, tied California’s rising prices to ongoing problems at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance. The facility, which typically produces about 10 percent of California’s specially formulated gasoline, has been offline for gas production since an equipment failure caused an explosion there in mid February, injuring four people.

“I can’t tell you how many billions of gallons of gas have not been produced as a result,” DeHaan said. “The refinery has been down for almost a year now.”

Exxon was hoping to refurbish the facility’s damaged electrostatic precipitator, which removes particulates during the production of gasoline. But when the company informed the state Air Resources Board the revamped unit would emit slightly more pollution than before, that option was denied, he said.

“California has some of the most stringent air pollution laws, so that was a no-go,” DeHaan said.

DeHaan said it appears that ExxonMobil may have put “too many marbles in one bag” by seeking to repair its existing electrostatic precipitator instead of buying a new one.

“They are not expecting a full restart until around June,” he said.

The problem has been compounded by the fact that California is an island when it comes to getting gas from outside the state.

States in the Midwest and Northeast have pipelines that connect to refineries in the Gulf Coast, but very few connections exist between California and outside sources, according to DeHaan.

Gasoline supplies can be brought to California by tanker ships, he said, but they must be U.S.-based vessels, and a limited number of those are available.

“You also have to look at the amount of time it takes to get supplies to California because they come from Asia and Europe and they have to go through the Panama canal,” DeHaan said. “With weather conditions, you might have five deliveries one week and none the next. So you could have a huge demand that week and not enough supply. That causes price spikes.”

Meanwhile, businesses and consumers throughout California are dealing with rising gas prices while oil prices are trending below $40 a gallon.

“It does impact us because we get 95 percent of our products from back east,” said Charles Aflalo, owner of Laurels Fine Furniture in Torrance. “The company that delivers our products tacks on a fuel surcharge and that goes up when gas prices rise.”

Fueled by safety and health concerns, CalEPA recently held a series of workshops to discuss imposing stricter refinery regulations in the wake of last year’s blast at the ExxonMobil refinery.

The refinery was sold last year to independent refiner PBF Energy for $537.5 million. But Exxon has to get the facility back up to full operation in order for the sale to be completed.