Canada Wildfires Raise Threat of Another Oil-Sands Shutdown
Energy analyst counsels clients to “pray for rain,” while Fort McMurray residents rehearse lessons learned from the 2016 blaze.
A wildfire burns near Shining Bank, Alberta, on May 5.
Photo: Alberta Wildfire/ReutersAbetted by an unseasonably hot spring, hundreds of wildfires have ignited across the Canadian province of Alberta, choking the skies with smoke and forcing the evacuation of about 40,000 people. The blazes in Canada’s top energy-producing province have knocked out a fifth of the nation’s natural gas output at times and are expected to put a dent in economic growth numbers for the month of May.
Alberta’s tar sands, whose 3.25 million barrels of daily oil output make Canada the world’s fourth-largest crude producer, have so far been spared, but officials are warning that conditions are ripe for fires to spring up anywhere, anytime. That possibility has companies, investors and the residents of the oil sands’ unofficial capital of Fort McMurray—which almost burned to the ground seven years ago—on high alert.