Category Archives: Alberta Canada

Alberta Canada, Climate action, Climate Change, Evacuation, Oil Industry, Oil producers, Tar sands crude, Wildfire

FORT MCMURRAY: Latest on the Alberta wildfires and tar sands mining

May 8, 2016 Roger Straw

By Roger Straw, April 8, 2016

I’ve had my eyes on Alberta Canada since June of 2013, when I first learned about the terrible destruction of pristine boreal forests and native communities in Alberta caused by the mining of tar-sands for crude oil production. Those operations are concentrated in the Fort McMurray area, so my interest and concern peaked recently when reports surfaced about the massive wildfires there.

Most, but not all of the mining operations are north of Fort McMurray, and most, but not all of the worst fires are in and to the south of Fort McMurray. But the fires and the oil mines are intimately linked. Here’s are several of the latest reports (thanks to Google):

Fort McMurray fire has been raging for over a week

CBC.ca–6 hours ago

It’s been one week since the fire known as “the beast” reared it’s ugly head. The wildfire outside of Fort McMurray, once measured in football fields, now sits at …

Fort McMurray Fire Could Last Months: Officials

Huffington Post Canada–17 hours ago

Man watches on CCTV as Fort McMurray fire devastates his home …

Yahoo7 News–17 hours ago

Wildfire at Fort McMurray quickly overtakes Canada’s environmental …

In-Depth–Los Angeles Times–5 hours ago

Fire continues to grow, expected to reach Saskatchewan border

International–The Globe and Mail–2 hours ago

Fort McMurray Wildfire: Evacuees Relocated as ‘Absolutely Vicious …

In-Depth–NBCNews.com–22 hours ago

Fires in Canada’s Oil-Sands Region Grow

Wall Street Journal–20 hours ago

More than 500 firefighters, 15 helicopters and 14 air tankers are trying to put out the fires in Fort McMurray, which grew by nearly 50% in the past day to now …

Canada Fire Disrupts, But Doesn’t Destroy, Oil Production

teleSUR English–9 hours ago

Emergency teams enter evacuated Fort McMurray to rescue the pets …

The Independent–1 hour ago

Disasters highlight the need for climate action

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette–11 hours ago

A dire warning

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel–5 hours ago

The ties that bind Canada together visible in Fort Mac

International–The Guardian Charlottetown–21 hours ago

Alberta Canada, Oil Industry, Oil producers, Tar sands crude, Wildfire

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Forest Fires Cut Into Canadian Oil Production

May 6, 2016 Roger Straw

Repost from the Wall Street Journal

Forest Fires Cut Into Canadian Oil Production

Alberta oil-sands companies reduce output, evacuate staff due to risk from encroaching blazes

By CHESTER DAWSON, Updated May 6, 2016 2:01 a.m. ET

The Suncor tar sands processing plant near near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Forest fires continued to rage in Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta on Thursday. PHOTO: REUTERS

CALGARY, Alberta—Raging forest fires in the heart of Canada’s oil-sands region curbed production and helped drive up global prices on Thursday as some worried enough oil was threatened to nearly wipe out the world’s oversupply.

Many companies evacuated staff and cut production because of pipeline outages and the risk from encroaching blazes. No oil operations reported fire damage, but their efforts to protect themselves led to a reduction of at least 645,000 barrels a day, or almost one-quarter of Canada’s 2.5 million barrels in total oil sands production. Much of that output is sent to refineries in the U.S.

The outages are widely expected to be temporary, but they drove up the price of typically heavily discounted Canadian crude in recent trading. Prices for the U.S. benchmark crude rose 1.2% to $44.32 a barrel Thursday, and the global benchmark gained about 1%—with worries about lower supplies from Libya and Nigeria also affecting trading.

If oil production now threatened by the Canadian fires were halted, it would be enough to nearly wipe out the world’s oversupply, said Tim Pickering, chief investment officer of Calgary-based Auspice Capital Advisors Ltd., which manages $300 million and an exchange-traded fund based on the Canadian Crude Index.

“This is the most important issue in oil today,” Mr. Pickering said. “That will put the system back in check really quick.”

Oil prices have been pressured for almost two years by excess supplies. But production has started to fall in the U.S. and elsewhere following massive spending cuts by energy companies. Meanwhile, demand continues to grow.

Analysts say the global market is less oversupplied than it was even a few months ago at a time when producers’ capacity to ramp up production has been reduced. That makes the oil market more vulnerable to a shortage if production is halted in any part of the world.

In addition to Canada, oil traders are currently worried about lower supplies from Libya because of political unrest and from Nigeria due to a pipeline outage. Some analysts also warn that Venezuela’s oil production could fall amid the country’s struggling economy and power shortages.

The longer-term impact of the Alberta fire remains unclear. Some officials say production will likely bounce back once the fire threat recedes; others say damage to infrastructure and from displaced workers could hamper efforts to ramp up output once the fires are put out.

“I expect we’ll recover fairly quickly, but it’s too early to say how much damage has been done to equipment and operations in the town of Fort McMurray,” Steve Laut, president of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., said on a conference call with analysts. Mr. Laut said that oil sands output at his company, a major oil and gas producer, hasn’t been affected by the disaster.

But the Bank of Nova Scotia said the destruction of property and loss of production at other oil sands operations could cast a long shadow. The forest fire fallout could mean “very little” GDP growth for the overall Canadian economy in the second quarter and that the damage to infrastructure will slow the recovery in the country’s oil patch, the bank said in a report.

In the latest of a series of plant closures, Suncor Energy Inc., Canada’s largest producer, late Thursday shut down all of its wholly owned oil sands assets, including two mines and a pair of well sites, which had been producing a total of 300,000 barrels a day. It had previously reduced output at another mining operation called Syncrude, in which it owns a controlling stake.

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Imperial Oil and ConocoPhillips also shut some production earlier Thursday. Exxon cut output by an undisclosed amount at its 194,000 barrel-a-day mine, citing “uncertainties.” Conoco halted a 50,000 barrel-a-day mine and evacuated all staff due to a fire near the town of Anzac. They followed a move Wednesday by Nexen Energy ULC, a subsidiary of China’s Cnooc Ltd. On Wednesday, the Canadian unit of Royal Dutch Shell PLC shut down two oil-sands mines, which produce 255,000 barrels a day, that it owns in partnership with Chevron Corp. and Marathon Oil Corp.

“That’s largely being done to allow folks to focus on rendering aid to the community and emergency response,” Lee Tillman, chief executive of Marathon Oil said on a conference call. “The mines themselves are not under any direct or immediate threat.”

—Nicole Friedman, Timothy Puko and Erin Ailworth contributed to this article.

Alberta Canada, Climate Change, Evacuation, Oil producers, Tar sands crude, Wildfire

THE NEW YORKER: Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change

May 5, 2016 Roger Straw

Repost from The New Yorker

Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change

BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT, May 5, 2016

A helicopter flies past a wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Wednesday. The blaze has spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles.A helicopter flies past a wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, on Wednesday. The blaze has spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON FRANSON / THE CANADIAN PRESS / AP

The town of Fort McMurray, some four hundred miles north of Calgary, in Canada, grew up very quickly on both sides of the Athabasca River. During the nineteen-seventies, the population of the town tripled, and since then it has nearly tripled again. All this growth has been fuelled by a single activity: extracting oil from a Florida-sized formation known as the tar sands. When the price of oil was high, there was so much currency coursing through Fort McMurray’s check-cashing joints that the town was dubbed “Fort McMoney.”

Now Fort McMurray is burning. A forest fire that began to the southwest of the town on Sunday has forced the entire population—almost ninety thousand people—to evacuate. On Wednesday, Alberta’s provincial government declared a state of emergency. By yesterday, more than fifteen hundred buildings had been destroyed and the blaze had spread through an area covering more than three hundred square miles. It was burning so hot that that it was easily able to jump major rivers. One Canadian official described the fire as “catastrophic.” Another called it a “multi-headed monster.”

No one knows exactly how the fire began—whether it was started by a lightning strike or by a spark provided by a person—but it’s clear why the blaze, once under way, raged out of control so quickly. Alberta experienced an unusually dry and warm winter. Precipitation was low, about half of the norm, and what snow there was melted early. April was exceptionally mild, with temperatures regularly in the seventies; two days ago, the thermometer hit ninety, which is about thirty degrees higher than the region’s normal May maximum. “You hate to use the cliché, but it really was kind of a perfect storm,” Mike Wotton, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the CBC.

Though it’s tough to pin any particular disaster on climate change, in the case of Fort McMurray the link is pretty compelling. In Canada, and also in the United States and much of the rest of the world, higher temperatures have been extending the wildfire season. Last year, wildfires consumed ten million acres in the U.S., which was the largest area of any year on record. All of the top five years occurred in the past decade. In some areas, “we now have year-round fire seasons,” Matt Jolly, a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, recently told the Times.

“You can say it couldn’t get worse,” Jolly added, but based on its own projections, the forest service expects that it will get worse. According to a Forest Service report published last April, “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970.” Over the past three decades, the area destroyed each year by forest fires has doubled, and the service’s scientists project that it’s likely to “double again by midcentury.” A group of scientists who analyzed lake cores from Alaska to obtain a record of forest fires over the past ten thousand years found that, in recent decades, blazes were both unusually frequent and unusually severe. “This extreme combination suggests a transition to a unique regime of unprecedented fire activity,” they concluded.

All of this brings us to what one commentator referred to as “the black irony” of the fire that has destroyed most of Fort McMurray.

The town exists to get at the tar sands, and the tar sands produce a particularly carbon-intensive form of fuel. (The fight over the Keystone XL pipeline is, at its heart, a fight over whether the U.S. should be encouraging —or, if you prefer, profiting from—the exploitation of the tar sands.) The more carbon that goes into the atmosphere, the warmer the world will get, and the more likely we are to see devastating fires like the one now raging.

To raise environmental concerns in the midst of human tragedy is to risk the charge of insensitivity. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alluded to this danger at a recent news conference: “Any time we try to make a political argument out of one particular disaster, I think there’s a bit of a shortcut that can sometimes not have the desired outcome.” And certainly it would be wrong to blame the residents of Fort McMurray for the disaster that has befallen them. As Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who is a Green Party member of British Columbia’s provincial legislature, noted, “The reality is we are all consumers of products that come from oil.”

But to fail to acknowledge the connection is to risk another kind of offense. We are all consumers of oil, not to mention coal and natural gas, which means that we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno. We need to own up to our responsibility, and then we need to do something about it. The fire next time is one that we’ve been warned about, and that we’ve all had a hand in starting.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

Alberta Canada, Evacuation, Oil Industry, Tar sands crude, Wildfire

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Canada Wildfires Force Evacuation, Hampering Oil-Sands Operations

May 5, 2016 Roger Straw

Repost from the Wall Street Journal

Canada Wildfires Force Evacuation, Hampering Oil-Sands Operations

Rapid spread of Alberta blaze prompts evacuation of Fort McMurray, hub of country’s oil-sands industry

By CHESTER DAWSON, Updated May 5, 2016 11:13 a.m. ET

CALGARY, Alberta—Raging forest fires in Canada’s oil-rich province of Alberta forced the evacuation of nearly 80,000 people, devastating the remote town at the hub of the country’s oil-sands industry and threatening to further burden a sector already plagued by low energy prices.

Some 76,000 people evacuated from Fort McMurray, 270 miles north of Alberta’s capital Edmonton, to shelters hundreds of miles north and south of the town, officials said, revising an earlier estimate of 88,000.

“We had a devastating day yesterday and we’re preparing for a bad day today,” said Darby Allen, the town’s regional fire chief, at a news briefing Wednesday. He said there were no known casualties or injuries.

The uncontrolled blaze shut down one major oil-sands mining operation on Wednesday and forced another to curtail production. Other operators have evacuated nonessential personnel to make room for thousands of evacuees who fled the disaster and sought refuge in camps designed to house temporary workers.

Firefighters working through Tuesday night extinguished all building fires by early morning, but local officials said nearly 25,000 acres around Fort McMurray were ablaze and that the downtown remains at risk for new fires.

“This is a very complex fire with multiple fronts and explosive conditions,” said Bernie Schmitte, wildfire manager for Alberta’s agriculture and forestry ministry. Officials said the cause of the fire, which they are calling Horse Creek, is being investigated to determine whether any human role or some other cause, such as lightning, triggered the blaze.

Most residents were informed about the mandatory evacuation on Tuesday afternoon and had only 30 minutes to prepare. “Residents were advised to grab what they could and go,” said Mr. Darby, the fire chief. “We didn’t factor in people taking family heirlooms.”

Provincial officials said about 1,600 buildings have been damaged by the fire, which burned parts of several housing subdivisions and some structures in the town center.

The town of Fort McMurray became the symbol of Canada’s oil boom the last decade, attracting some of the world’s biggest energy producers amid a rush to build megaprojects to extract nearby oil sands. Thanks to the influx of investment from producers such as Shell and Exxon Mobil, thousands flocked to “Fort McMoney” as the city spent millions building heated bus shelters, schools, bridges and hockey arenas to accommodate its rapidly growing and affluent population.

Thanks to the oil boom, Fort McMurray’s average household income hit C$186,782 (about $148,500) in 2013, the highest of any Canadian city. But since then, thousands of workers have been laid off due to the oil-price slump and according to the national statistics agency the town’s unemployment rate hit 9.8% in March, double the rate of five years ago.

Now, the town faces the grim task of rebuilding at a time when its biggest industry has been challenged by high extraction costs and low oil prices.

The premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, on Wednesday expressed hope that Fort McMurray would rebound from the damage. “Our province is strong and we will get through this. Albertans have proven time and time again that when disaster strikes, we come together and we find the solutions and we get through it,” she said.

Like some 10,000 other displaced residents, the mayor of Fort McMurray, Melissa Blake, stayed overnight Tuesday at an oil-sands camp with her husband and another family, sharing a room with a single bed. “The reality is setting in about how significant and serious the loss is,” Ms. Blake told reporters. “We have been a community fighting an uphill battle for a long time in terms of the rate of changing growth that we’ve been experiencing.”

The evacuation is the largest in Alberta’s history, forcing residents in more than 12 northern communities including Fort McMurray to leave their homes, according to the Canadian Red Cross. The Red Cross set up a toll-free number to help evacuees connect with family members.

Across the province, many private citizens opened their homes to those fleeing the fires, officials said.

The rapid spread of the blaze has started to affect operations at major oil-sands productions sites. The oil-sands facilities aren’t directly threatened by the uncontrolled forest fires, but mandatory evacuations of workers have brought some operations to a halt.

PHOTOS – (see below)

Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s Canadian unit halted its oil-sands mining operations, which produce about 250,000 barrels a day, to speed evacuations of people who fled to the site, which is about 60 miles north of the fires. A spokesman didn’t provide an estimate for how long the shutdown is expected to last.

Suncor Energy Inc., Canada’s largest oil producer, said late Tuesday that it reduced production at all of its oil-sands operations due to the forced evacuations. It also said that none of its operations were in the path of the forest fires. Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Canadian unit, Imperial Oil Ltd., said it was evacuating nonessential employees but that production hasn’t been affected “at this time,” according to a spokeswoman.

Inter Pipeline said it partially closed its 540,000 barrel-a-day Polaris pipeline system and its 346,000 barrel-a-day Corridor system. Related to Inter Pipeline’s moves, producer Husky Energy Inc. said it cut output at its Sunrise oil- sands plant by two-thirds, to 10,000 barrels a day.

Western Canadian Select, the benchmark Canadian heavy crude oil, traded Wednesday at $12.84 a barrel below the benchmark U.S. price, according to FactSet. That is the highest price relative to the U.S. price since March 1, with the price difference between the two contracts is 73 cents narrower than Tuesday.

Canada’s total oil sands production is around 2 million barrels a day, much of which is exported to the U.S.

The fires, which started late Sunday, spread from a forested area southwest of Fort McMurray and crossed the Athabasca River bisecting the town Monday. They began to threaten residential neighborhoods by midday Tuesday, prompting evacuations.

Officials said the town has been vacated by all but firefighting and public safety personnel, but first responders continued to check housing subdivisions and public buildings downtown for any remaining people, using door knocks, bullhorns and patrols by emergency vehicles. Dozens of pets left behind by their owners were taken to a local community center awaiting their owners, they said.

Traffic lines the highway as residents leave Fort McMurray on Tuesday. More than 80,000 residents were ordered to flee as a wildfire moved into the city, destroying whole neighborhoods PHOTO: JASON FRANSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Southbound traffic on Highway 63, the city’s main arterial road, resumed late Tuesday after being shut down earlier in the day as a precautionary measure due to the wildfires. An estimated 18,000 evacuees used the road to flee to Edmonton.

—David George-Cosh and Paul Vieira contributed to this article.