Alberta Wildfire Has Stopped Spreading, Officials Say
May 20 2016 - 4:00PM
Dow Jones News
CALGARY, Alberta—Firefighting efforts and favorable weather
conditions on Friday stopped the growth of forest fires in northern
Alberta that have prompted evacuations and disrupted crude-oil
production, provincial officials said.
The size of the out-of-control wildfire is unchanged from
Thursday, at around 1.25 million acres, and local authorities
expressed confidence they could prevent it from spreading due in
part to cooler, damper weather.
"We expect to hold this fire in place over the weekend," said
Chad Morrison, the Alberta forest ministry's chief wildfire
official, at a news conference in Edmonton.
No oil-sands production facilities have been damaged by the
fires, but at the height of the threat, Canadian oil production
dropped by at least one million barrels a day, or about 40% of the
country's total oil-sands output.
Mr. Morrison said blazes near two major oil-sands production
complexes operated by Suncor Energy Inc. and its Syncrude
subsidiary have receded to the point that they are no longer
considered to be at risk. "There's no immediate threat," he
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.
Both facilities remain under mandatory evacuation orders, along
with 19 work camps and the nearby town of Fort McMurray, from which
more than 80,000 people were evacuated earlier this month. Along
with damage to utilities, poor air quality remains a concern
because of smoke from fires in the surrounding forests, Karen
Grimsrud, Alberta's chief medical officer, told reporters.
Unsafe levels of airborne pollutants could affect the timing of
a planned lifting of the evacuation order in stages from June 1,
Ms. Grimsrud said.
Some oil-sands sites located further north of Fort McMurray have
resumed production at reduced levels. Imperial Oil Ltd., Exxon
Mobil Corp.'s Canadian unit, said late Thursday that 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, didn't provide a timeline for resuming full
operations at the facility, with a capacity of 194,000 barrels a
day.
While not damaged, many 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 20, 2016 15:45 ET (19:45 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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