Cool, Wetter Weather Aids Firefighting Efforts in Canada -- Update
May 19 2016 - 7:59PM
Dow Jones News
By Chester Dawson
CALGARY, Alberta -- The threat from forest fires in northern
Alberta receded further on Thursday with the blazes moving away
from oil-sands production facilities and a nearby evacuated town as
cooler, wetter weather aided firefighting efforts, provincial
officials said.
The out-of-control wildfire spread to more than 1.25 million
acres, up from just over one million acres on Wednesday, but the
front line moved away from critical infrastructure to a remote area
on the border of neighboring Saskatchewan province, the officials
said.
Firefighters kept blazes away from two major oil-sands
production complexes threatened earlier in the week, helped by
lower temperatures and trace amounts of rain, said Chad Morrison,
the Alberta forest ministry's chief wildfire official.
"The threat definitely has diminished around the communities and
the oil-sands facilities," Mr. Morrison said at a news conference
in Edmonton. "We held the fire yesterday in all critical
areas."
No production facilities have been damaged by wildfires, but the
threat has forced several large oil sands producers to shut down
mining and well sites for more than two weeks, reducing Canadian
oil production by at least one million barrels a day, or about 40%
of the country's total oil-sands output. The spread of fires forced
some operators to abandon plans laid last week to restart.
But late Thursday, Exxon Mobil Corp.'s Canadian unit Imperial
Oil Ltd. said it had partially restarted operations at its Kearl
oil sands mine about 47 miles northeast of Fort McMurray. Imperial
Oil, which shut down the mine 10 days ago, did not provide a
timeline for resuming full operations at the facility, with a
capacity of 194,000 barrels a day.
Mandatory evacuation orders remain for Fort McMurray along with
19 work camps and smaller communities in the area due mostly to
air-quality concerns and damage to key infrastructure, Alberta's
municipal affairs minister, Danielle Larivee, told reporters.
The government said Wednesday that the more than 80,000
residents evacuated from Fort McMurray earlier this month will be
allowed to return in stages starting June 1. No timeline has been
established for some 8,000 others evacuated from work camps.
Firefighters held the blaze to the perimeter of oil-sands mining
and processing facilities operated by Suncor Energy Inc. and its
Syncrude unit, burning some vegetation around the edges but not
damaging any equipment, officials said.
Suncor has closed down production of 300,000 barrels of oil a
day at two mines and a pair of oil-sands well sites, and its
Syncrude unit has shut its 350,000-barrel-a-day-capacity mines. The
Suncor and Syncrude facilities nearest to the fires are about 4
miles from one another, separated by a barren stretch of reclaimed
land and man-made ponds filled with waste materials from the
mines.
While not damaged, these and other oil-sands sites have been
affected by staffing issues stemming from the evacuation of Fort
McMurray's residents and logistics issues preventing them from
shipping heavy crude. Pipeline operator Enbridge Inc. has reduced
its oil-sands crude shipments by about 900,000 barrels a day, down
from a capacity of 1.5 million barrels a day.
Write to Chester Dawson at chester.dawson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 19, 2016 19:44 ET (23:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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